Notorious field commander to be buried behind barbed wire

The criminal investigation into the case of field commander Ruslan Gelayev and his rebels who raided into the south-eastern part of Dagestan in December 2003 was completed in on June 17. The rebels occupied several villages and shot down 12 border guards during the raid. Only 8 out of 41 participants in the raid survived. They will stand trial. The identification of Gelayev's body is over too. He was killed in the Tsuntinsky district of Dagestan on February 28. His body will not be given to his relatives, it will be secretly buried in a penal colony.

Meanwhile, Ruslan Gelayev was buried in absentia long ago in the Chechen village of Komsomolskoye, in which he was born; in the Pankissi Gorge, where he lived recently; in Moscow and Omsk, where his relatives live. The field commander's relatives have made several requests to give them the body, but they were denied. Investigators explained the denial by saying that Gelayev was not an ordinary bandit but a terrorist, and "under the federal law on combating terrorism, the terrorists' bodies are not given to their relatives."

Editors note: See also the article "Body of Gelayev is still in Rostov".