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COPENHAGEN - Chechen militants, like the group that took Moscow theatre-goers hostage, may take even more drastic action to oust Russian forces from their province, the envoy of Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov said on Sunday.
Akhmed Zakayev said Chechnya's elected leaders were ready for a political solution with Moscow but that desperate Chechen militants were beyond their control.
"We cannot guarantee that there will not be another group on Russian territory," he told Reuters in an interview.
"Terrorist acts are possible. We cannot exclude that the next such group takes over some nuclear facility. The results may be catastrophic, not only for Russian society and for Chechen society but for the whole of Europe," he said.
Chechen rebel fighters have in the past threatened to sabotage Russian economic targets and even strike at nuclear power plants.
Zakayev said Russia's leadership would have to bear responsibility for any such attacks because it had failed to end violence in Chechnya, a mostly Muslim region on Russia's southern fringe.
"What happened in Moscow was a gesture by desperate people, the result of the continuing war in Chechnya. These are people who have been subjected to violence, humiliation, who have lost their relatives," he said.
Zakayev reiterated that the Moscow theatre hostage-takers had acted without the knowledge of Maskhadov, a moderate who was elected Chechen president in 1997 but is now in hiding.
Maskhadov has condemned the action of the 50 or so guerrillas, most of whom were killed when Russian special forces stormed the theatre early on Saturday.
POLITICAL SOLUTION?
But his envoy said Russian authorities could have handled the siege differently, negotiating with the guerrillas and averting the mayhem in which 118 hostages died.
Zakayev said the guerrillas had presented "concrete demands of a political nature: to stop the violence, to pull out the Russian troops."
The next group of militants might not put forward demands but opt for direct action, he said.
"We are ready to move from the military fight to political means of solving the conflict," Zakayev said, speaking on behalf of Maskhadov's administration.
"But if the Russian military leadership expects our capitulation, this will not happen. Never. We have means to continue our struggle for as long as it will be needed, five, 10, 15 years."
Maskhadov led Chechen separatists in a 1994-96 war but became Moscow's preferred partner in talks that ended with peace and de facto independence.
But he was unable to stop the region descending into lawless chaos. In 1999, when Russian forces returned to Chechnya, the Kremlin equated Maskhadov with warlords it calls terrorists.
Zakayev, in Copenhagen for a Chechen conference, said he had heard reports of a crackdown on Chechens living in Moscow, after the siege ended and reports suggested that some gunmen escaped.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to cancel a visit to Copenhagen next month in protest against Denmark allowing the meeting of exiled Chechens to go ahead. /Reuters/
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