#2 - JRL 6524
Chechens targeted by police in security clampdown

MOSCOW, Oct 30 (AFP) - As Russia launched a massive anti-terrorism campaign in the wake of last week's hostage drama in a Moscow theater, Chechens said they were now more than ever being harrassed by police searching for possible accomplices to the hostage-takers.

"The repression of Chechens has begun. They trap them by putting drugs or weapons in their belongings so they can detain them, and force them to give their fingerprints -- that's illegal," Aslanbek Aslakhanov, Chechnya's elected representative in Russia's lower house of parliament, charged Tuesday.

Since Wednesday last week, when 50 Chechen commandoes stormed into a Moscow theater to capture some 800 hostages, the number of complaints of harassment from Russia's 500,000-strong Chechen community have soared.

"We've received lots of phone calls, letters and telegrams about abuse from all over Russia," said Aslakhanov, adding that he called on the government to put an end to "the police's hysterical behavior which sparks ethnic hatred."

Policemen who served in Russia's so-called anti-terrorist campaign in Chechnya were the worst, he added.

Racist attacks on Chechens were also feared, and police Wednesday reported an attack on a Chechen-owned shop in a Moscow suburb.

Part of the shop was set on fire early Tuesday and an anti-Chechen slogan daubed in red paint on the wall, Interfax quoted police as saying.

Russian authorities meanwhile banned a protest rally by an anti-war group scheduled for Thursday.

It was the first time in three years of activity that the group had been barred from staging its protest, Moscow Echo radio said.

President Vladimir Putin's appeal to the nation, in which he warned against anti-Chechen sentiment, appeared to have done little to improve the lot of ordinary Chechens such as 20-year-old student Karina Izbakhiyeva who has been part of Moscow's 100,000-strong Chechen population since 1999.

"Five men in civilian clothes called on us Friday. They took our passports and told us to come to the police station," Izbakhieva, who lives together with her mother and sisters, told AFP.

"They asked where I have been on Wednesday (when the hostage-taking occured), what I have done and who were my friends," she recounted.

"In the police station, they took our fingerprints and photographed us for the cases they opened on each of us," said the young student, whose father serves as a policeman in Chechnya.

Dozens of people were arrested Tuesday on suspicion that they might be involved with the hostage-takers, the interior ministry said as experts argued that the spectacular operation could not have succeeded without an underground network which provided the commando with arms and explosives.

Another young Chechen, Ayubkhan Darayev, told AFP he had spent two nights in a local police station before his lawyer's intervention set him free.

"Police came to us on Sunday morning. They took me and my sister-in-law. They threatened us with torture and hit me, they shouted 'What are you doing in Moscow? Get out of here!'", recalled Darayev, who has no permit to stay in the capital.

"They stopped only when I told them that the lawmaker Aslakhanov was my uncle," he told AFP by telephone.

Nevertheless, police took his fingerprints and photographed him, and his wife Kulsum was forced to spend a night in the station as well, he said.

"She was very nervous, because she still breastfeeds our nine-month-old baby," said Darayev, who left Chechnya in 1999 after Russia poured troops into the rebel republic in a bid to wipe out separatist guerrilla.