Reports say several taken hostage and security guards killed after attack by three armed men in Russian region.
(October 19,Moscow, Sri Lanka Guardian) Armed men have seized the parliament building in Russia's Caucasus region of Chechnya, according to a local interior ministry official quoted by news agencies.
Russia's Interfax news agency reported, citing an unidentified law-enforcement source, that the attackers had taken an unspecified number of hostages during Tuesday's raid in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.
A bomber and two armed men carried out the attack, the Russian international news agency RIA said.
"At the moment the shooting is continuing and special units of interior ministry troops, riot police and the Chechen presidential security service are arriving at the building," a security source told Interfax.
RIA said a suicide bomber had detonated explosives just outside parliament and that two armed attackers then engaged in a gun battle with guards around the building.
The local interior ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that an unspecified number of guards at the parliament had been killed and an aide to the speaker had also been wounded in the attack. He said: "The parliament building has been seized and hostages taken."
The Kremlin is struggling to contain a growing uprising in the North Caucasus, an area of impoverished, ethnically mixed provinces along predominantly Orthodox Christian Russia's southern border.
The Kremlin had declared victory in its battle with Chechen separatists, but analysts say a wave of shootings and bombings over recent months shows Moscow has failed to tame the violence.
Local leaders say it is fuelled by desperate poverty, clan rivalries, rampant corruption and heavy-handed tactics by law enforcement agencies.
Source:Agencies
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