MOSCOW - A Chechen terrorist group with ties to the late warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing attack on a North Caucasus regional leader that killed three, according to a statement posted on a rebel-linked Web site Sunday.
The group, which calls itself the Riyadus Salikhin Martyrs' Brigade, said it staged last week's attack on the president of the North Caucasus region of Ingushetia because of his support for Kremlin policies and because of his role in the second war in Chechnya that began in 1999.
"This operation has yet again showed the Kremlin and its slaves in the Caucasus that the mujahadeen are the legal authorities of this land and we will never accept the enemies' laws and its occupation," it said.
It was impossible to confirm the statement, but it was posted on a well-known Russian-language Web site that has long been used by rebel groups and sympathizers to publish diatribes and reports about Russia's North Caucasus.
Russian law enforcement authorities refused to comment on the statement.
The suicide bombing hit a convoy that Ingush President Yunus Bek Yevkurov was travelling with on June 22. Two bodyguards were killed and a third bodyguard died Saturday from his wounds.
Yevkurov, who was a military intelligence officer before being tapped by the Kremlin as Ingush president, remains in serious but stable condition in a Moscow hospital.
The bombing in Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya to the west, was the latest evidence that the violence in the regions along Russia's southern borders could be intensifying, despite the Kremlin's insistence that the Islamic-inspired insurgency in Chechnya was crushed and peace and prosperity was returning.
Until 2006, the Riyadus Salikhin Martyrs' Brigade -- which also been known as the Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs -- was headed by Basayev, a longtime rebel Chechen leader who was behind many of the worst terror attacks to hit Russia.
Basayev was killed that year and since then, little has been heard of the group, whose Arabic name underscores the support the Chechen insurgency had at one time from many Arab countries.
The U.S. State Department in 2003 slapped sanctions on the brigade -- in an effort to make it harder for supporters to fund its activities -- and the U.N. Security Council followed later.
It was unclear whether the group's emergence after so many years signified a new phase in the violence that has ravaged the North Caucasus since 1994, when the first Chechen war began.
Meanwhile, in a region bordering Chechnya to the east, police troops clashed with militants in an overnight gunbattle that killed four militants and one police officer.
Interior Ministry troops patrolling a village south of the Dagestani regional capital Makhachkala clashed with a group of 10 gunmen who tried to hole up in village houses Saturday, but were driven into surrounding hillsides, ministry spokesman Mark Tolchinsky said. A police officer was killed.
Officials then called in helicopter gunships and armoured vehicles to shell the forests where the gunmen hid out. Troops sweeping the forest Sunday morning found the bodies of four gunmen, Tolchinsky said.
Earlier this month, gunmen killed Dagestan's top law enforcement official as he stood outside a wedding banquet in Makhachkala.
