By empty (3/18/2004 issue of the CACI Analyst)

In a statement dated 18 March and circulated by chechenpress.com, Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected Chechen president in January 1997 in a ballot recognized by both Russia and the international community, expressed his gratitude to the European Parliament for its adoption on 26 February of a declaration formally condemning as an act of genocide the 1944 deportation on orders from Soviet leader Josef Stalin of the entire Chechen people to Central Asia. Maskhadov expressed the hope that the European Parliament will follow up by adopting a similar statement condemning the ongoing war in Chechnya as genocide.

By empty (3/17/2004 issue of the CACI Analyst)

An FSB officer who was one of nine Russians taken prisoner by Chechen resistance forces in Itum-Kale Raion in southern Chechnya on 14 March has told his captors that the FSB has shipped some 200 tons of explosives to France in preparation for staging four separate terrorist attacks, chechenpress.com reported on 17 March, quoting the Chechen information agency Kavkaz-Tsentr, which claimed to have received that information by e-mail from the Southwestern resistance front. That front is commanded by field commander Doku Umarov.

By empty (3/17/2004 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Gennadii Benditskii, a correspondent for the weekly \"Vremya,\" was acquitted on 17 March of libel charges. Asygat Zhabagin, head of the Republican Innovation Fund, sued Benditskii for libel in December 2003 over an investigative article the journalist wrote about the alleged disappearance of $1.5 million from the Kazakh Defense Ministry.