CHECHEN rebels pledged yesterday to free within 48 hours all hostages seized in a raid into southern Russia, except for several policemen, whom they hope to exchange for captured rebels.
The rebel chief of staff, Gen Asian Maskhadov, said the gunmen would release the hostages tomorrow in the eastern Chechen town of Novogroznensky without setting any conditions.
Chechen guerrillas are still holding about 60 of the 150 hostages they seized two weeks ago in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan, guerrilla leaders said.
An AFP correspondent was shown 37 hostages, including 16 policemen, who were being kept in a secret location in eastern Chechnya.
Mr Nazar Edilkhadzhiyev, one of the field commanders in charge of the hostages, said that about 20 more had been brought in from Dagestan overnight. An unknown number of others were being treated in hospitals or being kept at other sites, guerrilla leaders said yesterday.
Mr Edilkhadzhiyev said the hostages would probably be released soon but that their fate was to be decided by the Chechen rebel leader, Gen Dzhokhar Dudayev.
The hostages were seized in Dagestan after a raid by Chechen guerrillas on a Russian air base. The rebels and their captives were then trapped in the village of Pervomaiskoye, which Russian forces had failed to capture in repeated assaults.
Before dawn on Thursday, Chechen rebels broke out through surrounding Russian troops, taking large numbers of the hostages with them to neighbouring Chechnya.
Most of the rebels, including the commander, Mr Sal man Raduyev, were able to escape to Chechnya, guerrilla leaders said. Russian authorities have said that 84 of about 150 hostages were freed.
In Moscow, the Interfax news agency reported yesterday that a group of Chechen fighters had attempted to blow up a dam on the Terek river on the Dagestan Chechen border overnight.
According to a spokesman for the Russian military command, the attack near the village of Kargalinskoye, in the north east of the breakaway Chechen republic, was unsuccessful.
He added that Russian forces were neutralising Chechen field command posts near the villages of Bamut and Roshny Chu, south west of the Chechen capital, Grozny, and also in the vicinity of Vinogradnoye, in the northeast, and Alkhan Yurt to the south.
The spokesman said that one Russian soldier had been killed and four wounded over the past 24 hours.
Authorities in the Russian region of Stavropol, north west of Chechnya, said they had begun long and difficult negotiations for the release of 29 building workers seized three weeks ago by separatists in the region of Achkhoy Martan, south west of Grozny.
It was not clear what the hostage takers were demanding. Some 30 building workers were taken hostage, but one of them died in unspecified circumstances, the ITAR TASS news agency said.
Russian authorities have given no indication on the fate of a further 30 workers of an electric power station in Grozny, who were seized at dawn on Tuesday. The Chechen rebels who took 50 hostages in a foray into Dagestan will be court martialled and punished for exceeding orders, Gene Dudayev said in an interview.
He told the weekly news magazine, US News and World Report, that Mr Sal man Raduyev and his troops had been sent to attack Russian military helicopters in Kizlyar and blow them up but then went further.
"Raduyev and his men decided they would take the hospital. His idea was to get safe passage for wounded Chechen children to the hospital," said Gen Dudayev. When he realised the difficulty with this plan, he released the hostages and left the hospital."
"The Russians broke their promise of safe passage. As our men fought their way out of [the Dagestan town of] Pervomaiskoye, they took approximately 100 Russian prisoners in order to swap them for the 15 Chechens left behind.
Raduyev is back in Chechnya; I have met with him," he said. Kizlyar was supposed to be a purely military operation, so Raduyev will be brought to trial under full martial law and his punishment will be such that it hopefully will deter other field commanders from taking such action in the future."
The Chechen separatist leader also said that Abkhazi separatists had initiated and carried out the ferry hijacking in the Turkish port of Trabzon.