The Prosecutor's Office in Russia's Ulyanovsk Region, on the Volga River, has instructed a district court to conduct criminal proceedings against a group of Islamic militants suspected of a whole number of serious crimes. According to Vasily Zima, senior assistant to the Ulyanovsk Prosecutor, eight members of the group have been arrested. They are facing charges of banditry, kidnapping, illegal possession of firearms, munitions and explosive devises, instigation of interethnic hatred and religious strife, robbery, and murder, among others. The detainees include local residents, as well as from the neighboring republics of Chuvashia, Tatarstan, and Daghestan. One of them, Lev Selendeyev, worked at a district police department in Ulyanovsk, Mr. Zima said.The Prosecutor's assistant said the gang had been involved with the distribution of Wahhabist literature and video materials debasing Christians and Jews, as well as non-radical Moslems. "A socio-psycho-linguistic examination conducted in Kazan has proved the fact that that literature contains calls for interethnic strife," Mr. Zima said. It appealed to each "true" Moslem to help his/her co-religionists, including by providing weaponry, military specialists, planners and so forth. As investigators have established, the gang made use of weapons such as pistols (including with a silencer in case of contract killings), explosives, Kalashnikov rifles, a 7.62mm caliber carbine, a single-barrel hunting gun, an optic sight, and a night-vision device.
The 30-strong group, based in an apartment re-fitted as a mosque, started its operations in the summer 2002. Its members frequently visited the republic of Daghestan, in the North Caucasus, as well as cities like Astrakhan, Naberezhnye Chelny, Samara, Kanash, and Kazan, to share expertise with fellow fundamentalists. They also played host to similar groups from Bashkiria, Mordovia, the Saratov Region, Nizhny Novgorod, and Togliatti, Vasily Zima said.