Two separate militant attacks in Russia's Chechnya region killed three police officers and three civilians, a law enforcement official said Sunday.
A fourth officer was seriously wounded in one of the attacks, the latest in a moderate upsurge in the violence clouding the predominantly Muslim province's recovery from two devastating wars, the official said.
Two police and two civilians were killed Saturday in a clash that erupted when they came under fire in the southern Shatoi district during an operation aimed at persuading militants to surrender, the Chechen Interior Ministry official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give his name for attribution.
The civilians were relatives of militants in the area, he said.
Early Sunday, gunmen opened fire on a district police headquarters in the village of Elistanzhi, killing a deputy commander of an elite Interior Ministry unit operating in southern Chechnya and seriously wounding another officer in the unit, the official said. A resident was also killed in the attack, the official said.
Major fighting died down years ago in Chechnya, the site of two wars since 1994 pitting separatist rebels against government forces.
The province is being rebuilt under Kremlin-backed strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, the regional president whose methods of establishing order and neutralizing opposition have prompted allegations of human rights violations. An unknown number of rebels are still active, many of them based in the mountainous south, and the region remains plagued by violence.
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