Chechen police yesterday searched for further clues in the savage murder of four western hostages who were decapitated during an ill-fated operation to rescue them.
Hundreds of Chechen police combed the area near the border with the southern Russian republic of Ingushetia where the severed heads of the three British citizens (one of Irish parentage), and one New Zealander were discovered on Tuesday, officials said.
Meanwhile, the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, pressed his Russian counterpart, Mr Igor Ivanov, in Brussels for details of how these first Western hostages killed in Chechnya since the end in 1996 of a 21-month war of secession met their deaths.
Mr Ivanov vowed that Russia would do everything it could to find the murderers.
"President Yeltsin sent his condolences and will not spare any effort in finding and punishing the guilty men," the minister said.
The Chechen President, Mr Aslan Maskhadov, admitted that the four telecoms engineers, who were seized in October, were killed last Friday during an operation to rescue them.
Mr Darren Hickey (27), Mr Peter Kennedy (46) and Mr Rudi Petschi (42), from Britain, and a New Zealander, Mr Stan Shaw (58), were working for a British company, Granger Telecoms, in Chechnya when they fell victim on October 3rd to the spate of kidnappings which has swept the north Caucasus.
In Moscow the British ambassador, Sir Andrew Wood, met the Russian Interior Minister, Mr Sergei Stepashin, and received assurances that Moscow would devote a team of investigators to track down the killers.
British officials could not yet make a formal identification of the remains, said an embassy spokesman, Mr Mike Haddock, but "based on reports it seems almost certain that they are the bodies of our people who were kidnapped".
Chechnya's chief prosecutor, Mr Mansur Tagirov, said the dead men's severed heads were being held at Grozny's forensic institute, but Mr Haddock said British officials would not be sent to recover the remains.
Mr Haddock said: "Once we have absolute confirmation and positive identification we'll have to work on bringing the bodies back to the UK as soon as is practicably possible."