MOSCOW (AFP) – Russian forces have killed three men including an organiser of failed New Year terror attacks in Moscow when they put up resistance during a routine security check in the unrest-infested Caucasus, police said on Saturday.
Late Friday police and the FSB security service officers killed three men in Dagestan after their attempts to stop a suspicious-looking car met with resistance, regional police said.
The attackers began shooting at the security forces and were killed by return fire.
Police identified one of the assailants killed near the village of Manas as Kamil Magomedov, who it said was behind the failed bombings that were supposed to rock Moscow on the New Year's Eve.
"He looked after those who sought to organise the attacks in Moscow on December 31 when Zavzhat Daudova blew herself up," a spokeswoman for Dagestani police told AFP.
Russian investigators said at the time the Russian capital had escaped twin suicide bombings on the last day of 2010 by a sheer stroke of luck as Daudova had accidentally set off her suicide belt before heading into the city centre.
The second potential suicide bomber fled after the explosion but was later arrested.
Russia is fighting an Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus, where it fought two wars with Chechen separatists in the 1990s, and the Caspian region of Dagestan has experienced some of the deadliest violence.
Islamic militants are seeking to establish an independent state across the North Caucasus and vowed to make 2011 a year of "blood and tears" for Russia.
In January, a suicide bomber from the Caucasus blew himself up at Russia's biggest Domodedovo airport, killing 36 and injuring more than 100.
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