ROSTOV-ON-DON, June 24 (RIA Novosti) - Two militants were killed by Russian security forces on Wednesday in the Ingush village of Ekazhevo, where a third has taken cover in a house, a spokesman for the republic's Interior Ministry said.
The spokesman told RIA Novosti that three men opened fire on Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service (FSB) personnel, who returned fire, killing two militants. The third man fled and took cover in a private house.
"At approximately 6:00 pm Moscow time [15:00 GMT] Ingushetia's Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service colleagues were following up on timely intelligence and stopped a Lada passenger car, in which three men were located and resisted the officers," the spokesman said.
Special forces from both Ingushetia and Chechnya are operating in the border zone between the republics alongside federal troops.
Russia's North Caucasus republics have been swept by a wave of violence recently, two months after the government formally ended its decade-long counterterrorism operation in Chechnya, which witnessed two brutal separatist wars in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya, continues to see frequent militant attacks on officials and police.
Ingush President Yunus-bek Yevkurov survived an assassination attack on Monday near the city of Nazran and is currently in a critical condition in a Moscow hospital. He received serious head and internal injuries when his motorcade was hit by a suspected suicide car bomb.
