SEPARATIST rebels who have been besieging government buildings in the centre of the Chechen capital for four days began to pull back toward the western part of the city yesterday, Interfax news agency said.
It quoted Russian commanders there as saying that the rebels were pulling back towards the marketplace and railway station after the arrival of Russian reinforcements.
The station lies less than 2 km west of the government compound. The marketplace is situated between them.
Interfax also said a group of Russian journalists trapped in the basement of a hostel in the besieged government compound together with many other civilians had been rescued unharmed.
But later Itar Tass news agency quoted its correspondent, Sergei Trofimov, one of the group, as denying that report.
"Information that the journalists had been taken away from the hostel is not true," Tass said. "On the contrary another six persons have joined the group . . . Five women and a child managed to get to the hostel's basement under a hurricane of fire."
Mr Trofimov said that the fighting in central Grozny was still raging yesterday afternoon.
Journalists in the city are as limited in their movements and communications as tens of thousands of other civilians, who have been forced to take cover in cellars since Tuesday morning.
The rebels, fighting for independence from Russia, launched a raid on Grozny on Tuesday saying they wanted to demonstrate their force and sour President Yeltsin's second term inauguration ceremony, held in Moscow at midday yesterday.
The separatists seized large parts of the city and prevented Russian reinforcements from entering it for nearly three days.
Russian media have quoted rebel military commanders as saying they did not intend to hold Grozny for long and planned to withdraw from the city and return to their mountain bases in the south of the region by the weekend.
Tass quoted interior ministry headquarters in the region as saying that around 4 p.m. (local time) Russian troops started moving towards the centre, meeting fierce rebel resistance.
It said that one column of Russian forces moving from the south was"slowly winning ground, metre by metre" moving towards the Minutka roundabout to the south of the city centre.
Another column moving from the north west had advanced 3 km breaking through rebel ambushes, Tass said.