Moscow car crash injures Chechen prime minister

The prime minister of Russia’s conflict-torn province of Chechnya was in a serious but stable condition today after a car crash outside Moscow that officials insisted was a traffic accident despite initial concerns about a possible assassination attempt.

Sergei Abramov is the second most senior official in the Moscow-backed administration in Chechnya, which is to hold parliamentary elections in 10 days as part of the Kremlin’s plan to undermine the republic’s separatist rebels through restoring political and civil order.

The crash occurred late yesterday when the car in which Abramov was travelling collided with a truck west of Moscow, Abramov aide Igor Tarasov said.

“His condition is stable,” Tarasov told journalists in the Chechen capital, Grozny.

Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, son of the slain Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in a bomb attack in May 2004, took over Abramov’s duties temporarily.

Chechen President Alu Alkhanov ruled out the possibility of an assassination attempt on Abramov’s armour-plated car, which was taking him to a Moscow airport from where he was to travel to Chechnya.

“According to my information, there was no assassination attempt,” the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Alkhanov as saying.

Tarasov, who first said it was too early to say whether the road crash was a deliberate attack or an accident, later said he was convinced foul play could be ruled out.

“It was just an accident, it could happen to any of us,” he said in comments televised by the NTV channel.

Russia has a high rate of traffic accidents. Last year, nearly 35,000 people died in vehicle crashes; by comparison, the US with a population twice that of Russia’s records about 42,000 traffic fatalities a year.

The state Channel One television network cited doctors as saying that the fact that Abramov’s car was armour-plated had protected him from more life-threatening injuries.

Doctors at a Moscow clinic operated on Abramov’s kidney and lung, a spokesman for the Chechen administration in Grozny, Salavi Visargov, told The Associated Press. Abramov’s life was not in danger, but he would need several weeks to recover, Chechen Health Minister Shakhid Akhmadov was quoted as saying by Interfax.

Abramov was appointed prime minister of the restive southern Russian republic, where a conflict has raged for most of the past decade, in March 2004.

In July 2004, a roadside bomb tore through Abramov’s motorcade as it was passing through the Chechen capital, Grozny. Abramov was not injured, but one of his bodyguards was killed and three other people were wounded.

On November 27, voters in Chechnya are to elect a parliament for the first time since the start of the current conflict pitting separatist rebels against Russian forces in 1999 – the region’s second war in a decade.

Fighting persists, and the mostly Muslim region is plagued by daily violence and rampant abductions blamed alternately on Russian troops, rebel fighters and forces of the Moscow-backed Chechen government.