Members of the Abkhazian People's Party met with leaders of the "Akhyatsa" social and political movement in Sukhum on January 12. They discussed their positions and priorities in their activity.

"I have been mistaken believing that President Putin will help find truth and will repent of his order to use homicidal gas," Ms. Khakamada confesses in her statement. Now she has decided to respond to the appeal by relatives of those who died as a result of the explosions of apartment houses in Moscow in 1999 and during the storm of "Nord-Ost".

Foreign Minister of the Republic of Nagorny Karabakh Ashot Gulyan has given comments on the refusal of the Azerbaijan authorities to receive the Armenian representatives at NATO's conference in Baku.

The recruits who will win the competition will get special training at the Mozdok Training Center and then will be sent to Khankala.

A group of Ingush Migration Service officials, led by acting head of this organization Akhmed Parchiyev, visited the Satsita camp on January 12.

"Heidi Tagliavini emphasized the important role of the Russian peacekeeping force in the cause of keeping peace in the zone of the conflict," CIS Peacekeeping Forces press secretary Sergey Isayev said to journalists.

The criminal case, which saw the book by Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky "Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within" (in Russian titled simply "FSB Blows Up Russia") withdrawn from circulation, is being conducted by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).

Before her meeting with the Abkhazian leadership, Heidi Tagliavini met with new Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. He expressed readiness to continue the dialogue with Abkhazia, she said.

The Krasnodar Territorial Court declared admissible an appeal against the decision by the Anapa City Court on the deportation of two Turks-Meskhetians from the Russian Federation.

For the first time, Soma Radio, Sukhum, has launched a series of programs devoted to social issues. The project is being implemented with the help of the British NGO Conciliation Resources.

They were arrested last week in the suburbs of Lyons, France.

Some 20 refugees from Abkhazia seized the building of Tbilisi's sanitary service on the nights of January 12-13. The refugees said they would stay inside the building until Georgia's authorities helped them return to Abkhazia.

The Stavropol police have freed a 14-year-old kidnapped girl, whom the bandits have been holding locked up for fourteen days. A source at the Information Office of the Stavropol Territorial Interior Department informed that the bandits had wanted to get a ransom of half a million rubles for her release.

The new Chechen parliament will consist of two chambers: the Council of the Republic and the National Assembly; each will have 61 deputies.

Vladimir Kazimirov notes in his article that despite the fact that a long-standing standstill in the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have been explained by the inconvenience of the pre-election climate in Armenia and Azerbaijan for the last years, no ray of hope can be seen after the elections too.

On December 1, 2003, Ilgar Ibragimoglu was summoned to the Prosecutor General's Office to give evidence in connection with the October events, there he was arrested as a person suspected of organization of mass riots and offering resistance to the police.

"We declare for the good-neighbor relations with Georgia, when the parties are equal in rights, and we would like the new Georgian authorities to understand it," said Nugzar Ashuba.

"An operative-investigative group is working at the scene of the incident. The main version is negligence when handling weapons. The territory is highly protected, therefore the version concerning the terrorist attack is of small possibility," head of the information department of the republican Interior Ministry Ruslan Atsayev said. The investigation considers all versions of the incident, the Chechen Prosecutor's Office announced.

Without giving any comments, the Azerbaijan Embassy in Tbilisi refused to grant the Armenian officers the visas to take part in the conference forestalling NATO's military exercises that are to take place in Baku.

"Yesterday's conclusion of the bombing trial in Moscow left us with feelings of profound dismay and frustration. We believe that justice has not been served, but the continued cover-up of a heinous crime has reached a new horrific proportion," reads the statement of Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, daughters of a woman killed in the 1999 apartment bombings.