4 Westerners Held Hostage in Chechnya Found Slain

Authorities found the severed heads of four foreign hostages in a sack dumped outside a village in the war-ravaged republic of Chechnya on Tuesday--an especially gruesome end to one of the most prominent abductions in a plague of kidnappings in the region.

The four men, three Britons and a New Zealander, had been installing a cellular telephone network in Chechnya when they were abducted Oct. 3 after a shootout between the team’s bodyguards and unidentified gunmen.

“Their murder is an appalling and barbaric act,” said Ray Verth, director of Granger Telecom, the British firm that sent the engineers to the secessionist region in southern Russia despite warnings that it was too dangerous for foreigners.

“We were especially shocked by this horrific news, as we were making every effort to secure the safe release of the hostages,” he said. “We had opened a dialogue with the kidnappers and received confirmation that the hostages were alive as recently as last week.”

Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov told local reporters that his security officers had launched a rescue attempt Monday night, an action that apparently triggered the killings. He said he was outraged and blamed the killings on “foreign secret services,” presumably from Russia, who want to discredit his republic.

The victims were British citizens Darren Hickey, Rudolf Petschi and Peter Kennedy and New Zealander Stanley Shaw. Their heads, found near the village of Assinovskaya, were identified by one of their former bodyguards. Their bodies were still missing.

The killings drew vehement denunciations from the Russian, Chechen, New Zealand and British governments.

“We will work hard to find out the truth,” British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said. “We need to know what happened and what is being done to bring to justice those who committed such repugnant murders.”

Chechnya fought a two-year war to secede from Russia, a conflict that ended in 1996 with a truce that left the region’s political status ambiguous. The Chechen government insists that the republic is now an independent state, but no country--including Russia--has recognized it as such.

The war devastated the region, leaving an infrastructure struggling to catch up to the modern world, and Chechen authorities have been unable to rein in bands of fighters who are blamed for the rampant kidnappings. More than 100 people are believed held for ransom in Chechnya, including about a dozen foreigners.

Prominent Russian financier Boris A. Berezovsky has helped free several dozen hostages, and news reports have suggested that he paid some form of ransom in the process. Two British aid workers, Camilla Carr and Jon James, were freed in September with Berezovsky’s help, although the British and Russian governments have denied that any money changed hands.

“There are absolutely wild gangs that live off this,” Berezovsky said in a TV interview Tuesday. “They are impossible to control. Neither Russian federal authorities nor the Chechen authorities can control them.

“I never made contact with the people that might have helped return these men,” he added. “I did my best, but unfortunately I failed.”

Western governments have repeatedly warned foreigners to steer clear of Chechnya, where they are prominent targets.

Six Westerners working at a Red Cross hospital in Chechnya were gunned down in their beds in December 1996, prompting the international aid organization to pull out. A U.N. refugee official, Frenchman Vincent Cochetel, was kidnapped in January in a neighboring region and is believed held inside Chechnya.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s personal representative to the region, Valentin Vlasov, was kidnapped while on a mission to end the abductions. He was freed last month after being held for nearly six months.

In March 1995, prominent American aid worker Frederick C. Cuny disappeared in Chechnya while working for the Soros Foundation. He is believed to have been killed shortly after he disappeared, but his body has never been found.

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Times staff writer Marjorie Miller in London contributed to this report.