Chechen police killed 12 militants today as they repulsed a raid on the Moscow-backed president's home village.
Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov told state-run Rossiya-24 TV he headed the operation to fight off the attack on his village of Tsentoroi and said 12 insurgents were killed. His office also confirmed his account of the raid.
It was not clear however whether Mr Kadyrov, himself a former Chechen rebel, was in the village at the time of the attack, or directing operations from the republic's capital Grozny, some 60km away.
Some 30 rebels attacked the village early this morning, a source in the North Caucasus Federal District police in the nearby Stavropol region, told RIA news agency. Only a few rebels shooting a video of the raid managed to escape, it said.
Five civilians and two policemen were also killed in the attack, RIA said, but it said it could not immediately confirm the toll of 12 rebel dead cited by Mr Kadyrov and his office.
An Islamist website challenged the official data saying that at least 15 of Kadyrov's security officers were killed, while a total of 60 insurgents attacked the village. Five rebels were also killed, it said.
The insurgents spent about an hour rampaging through the village, the website said, citing local residents, and torched 10 houses it described as belonging to "Kadyrov's confidants". It was not clear whether Mr Kadyrov's own house was also set ablaze, it said.
Mr Kadyrov has vowed to bring peace and stability to the republic which has seen more than 15 years of sporadic separatist conflict, but Chechnya remains beset by political murders and extrajudicial killings.
Mr Kadyrov has been the target of a number of assassination attempts in the past 10 years, and Tsentoroi was raided by insurgents back in 2004, in what the president said was an attack aimed to kill him.
Many of the neighbouring Russian republics in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus are also afflicted by simmering insurgencies and 10 rebels were killed in Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkaria yesterday.
Reuters