Chechen Gunmen Reach Homeland Rebels Release Hostages After Week Of Holding Off Russians

Chechen gunmen who terrorized a Russian town for five days returned to their homeland in a bus convoy on Tuesday night and released their last 123 hostages - volunteers who had agreed to go on the rebels’ flight - in a Chechen border town.

The Chechen rebels, who had held hundreds of Russians captive in a hospital in the Russian town of Budyonnovsk, traveled into central Chechnya on Tuesday night with two buses and a refrigerated truck that carried their own dead from fighting Russian troops who twice tried to storm the hospital.

The Chechen people seem to expect the rebels, or at least their leader, to head for Vedeno, although the Russian military says it has no intention of letting the gunmen escape. Throughout the trip, Russian helicopters hovered over the convoy, and Interior Ministry officials said they were monitoring the column.

Talks in Grozny on Tuesday between the rebels and the Russian government produced an agreement on a three-day cease-fire to begin today, with some negotiators hinting at an imminent exchange of prisoners and, eventually, a gradual withdrawal of Russian troops. But now that the Chechens are back in their own territory without hostages, many people think such agreements will not last a day.

In Moscow, government officials scrambled on Tuesday to assign blame. President Boris Yeltsin said on Tuesday that he was in constant contact with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin throughout the long televised negotiations he conducted with Shamil Basayev, the leader of the Chechens who raided the Russian town and seized the hospital. But Yeltsin made only cursory comments about the negotiations.

“I do not see any mistakes on his part,” Yeltsin said, referring to his prime minister. The Russian press savaged the president and his government, however, as newspapers from the left, center, and right all expressed the sentiment, in huge front page headlines, that the nation has become a hostage of its impotent leaders.

Police officials, invoking their right to detain anyone without a proper residence permit, rounded up as many as 2,000 Chechens, mostly grocers and peddlers.