The seizure of a bus containing 41 people near the southern town of Mineralnye Vody yesterday was a stark reminder to Russians that the Chechen problem remains with them.
Thirteen hours later commandos from the FSB domestic security services stormed the bus, freeing the hostages and killing one hijacker. Meanwhile, rebels claimed they had killed 29 Russian troops inside Chechnya itself.
The hijack took place in the heart of Russia's bandit country, where kidnappings and bombings are commonplace. The main demand of the hijackers was the release of a group of five men imprisoned for a similar bus hijacking in 1997.
A photographer at the scene said he heard what sounded like a stun grenade go off just before commandos stormed the red commuter bus, which was surrounded by snipers.
The bus was shrouded in smoke as the commandos rushed towards it. The operation took around 30 seconds.
Mr Alisher Khodzhayev, a deputy aide to the regional presidential representative, said commandos had thrown stun grenades to distract the gunmen and a hijacker was shot dead by a sniper.
"Nothing happened to the hostages. The windows [of the bus] were broken and some of them were injured by glass . . . but they were so happy they did not notice their wounds," he told ORT public television.
At least two men were involved in the attack and were armed with sub-machineguns and grenades. One of them was named by the ITAR-TASS news agency as Mr Sultan-Said Idiyev (34), an ethnic Chechen.
The hijacking took place at 7 a.m. local time as the bus was on its way from the town of Nevinnomyssk to the city of Stavropol, once the political stronghold of the former Soviet president, Mr Mikhail Gor bachev.
The terrorists had demanded access to the airport and later, having released up to 14 passengers, had called for the use of a helicopter.
One of the group was given a radio to remain in contact with the outside world. President Putin, according to his office, monitored the situation while the Interior Minister, Mr Boris Gryzlov, in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, was in direct contact with the authorities in the region.
In the course of the Chechen war, rebels have hijacked two aircraft, a ferry and a hospital as well as commandeering part of a hotel in Istanbul. The two most dramatic incidents were the taking of 2,000 hostages in the town of Kizlyar in 1996 and the killing of more than 150 people in the town of Budyonnovsk a year earlier.
In a separate development Chechen rebels delivered a series of bulletins through their website (www.kavkaz.org) clai ming Mujahideen had killed more than 22 Russian soldiers when they attacked a convoy near Argun and that they had killed seven paratroopers in another area of Chechnya.
