Police in Russia’s far east stormed a house yesterday where suspects in a rare string of attacks on police were holed up, killing two and detaining a third, law enforcement officials and media reported.
Attacks on police are rare in Russia outside the turbulent Caucasus, where the Kremlin is battling an Islamist insurgency spawned by two post-Soviet wars against Chechen rebels and law enforcement authorities are targeted in near daily attacks.
The suspected gang’s motives were murky, but there has been speculation of anger over police corruption and abuse — a hot-button topic in Russia, where Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is struggling to reform a police force tainted by scandals.
The siege followed a days-long hunt for a handful of men accused in the fatal May 27 shooting of a policeman, as well as two other attacks that injured three other police officers and the torching of a police station.
A single suspect remained in the building in the city of Ussuriysk after a three-hour siege punctuated by exchanges of gunfire, provincial investigative official Avrora Rimskaya said, according to the state-run RIA news agency.
At least one police officer was injured, Rimskaya said in televised comments.
Media have reported a former paratrooper who served in the wars in Chechnya, Roman Muromtsev, 32, was the gang’s leader.
Authorities have urged citizens not to have sympathy for the suspects.
“These are people lacking any concept of morality — the law does not exist from them,” Rimskaya said in televised comments.
Muromtsev, the alleged leader of the gang that has been dubbed the “Russian Rambos,” is a former army officer and Chechen war veteran, who sent a warning letter to police last month. In it, he said local people had grown fed up with police corruption and lawlessness. Unless the force mended its criminal ways, he would be compelled to act as a “people’s avenger,” he threatened.
They have reportedly seized uniforms, flak jackets and radio communications equipment. The gang are armed with automatic weapons, explosives and even grenades, officials said.
The gang’s exploits have gripped the Russian media. More shocking, however, is the public’s reaction — with 70 percent of Russians, according to one radio poll, describing the gang members as “partisans” or “Robin Hoods.” Only 30 percent considered the police killers to be bandits, the poll revealed. One blogger even compared them to Che Guevara.
“We are in shock over remarks left on the Internet,” policeman Mikhail Konstantinov said.
“People are saying it’s OK to kill police officers and are even congratulating the criminals who do it. It’s horrible. There’s no escaping the fact that a young policeman has been killed for simply doing his job,” he told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
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