RUSSIA - Jan 27 - 7 Dead As Standoff Ends In Shootout.

Hundreds of police officers and soldiers storm an apartment building in southern Russia, killing seven suspected Islamic extremists after a two-day standoff. The violent climax to the standoff was at least the fourth shootout with suspected Islamic rebels this month, each pitting elite armored troops against a handful of fighters barricaded inside a residential building. Black smoke billowed from the building in Nalchik, the regional capital of the province of Kabardino-Balkariya, near Chechnya, as police officers and Interior Ministry troops fired automatic weapons and hurled grenades. The gunmen returned fire, wounding two police officers, the Interior Ministry said. After a five-hour shootout, the authorities found seven bodies, an Interior Ministry spokesman, Alexei Polyansky, said. The ITAR-Tass news agency said that the wife of one of the militants and their 8-month-old child were among those killed. Some police officials said up to four of the dead were women. The deputy prosecutor general Nikolai Shepel, denied that a child's body had been found. Security officials said the militants were believed to belong to Yarmuk, a radical Islamic group affiliated with the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev and the target of previous law enforcement efforts in Kabardino-Balkariya. Nikolai Shepel said one of the dead was the leader of Yarmuk, Muslim Atayev. Officials said the suspects, who had been holed up in two apartments, had been seeking safe passage out of Nalchik in the North Caucasus, 870 miles, or 1,400km, south of Moscow. It was unclear whether there were other demands. About 600 residents of the building and adjacent blocks had been evacuated. Government forces converged on the area on Jan 25, after local residents reported a group of armed men had entered the building. Tass news agency reported that the militants had tried to shoot at a passenger aircraft from the local airport, forcing the cancellation of all flights for the duration of the siege. Tass said that the windows of the building faced the airport and that witnesses had observed an attempt to shoot at a plane. It gave no further details. The Russian forces made preparations for the assault during the night, evacuating local residents from the scene and positioning snipers around the perimeter. The building's gas, water and electricity were cut off as about 300 police and security agents surrounded the structure. After several hours, the commandos forced their way into the ground floor of the blackened building, but the rebels continued to offer resistance before finally being subdued. Yarmuk was linked to last month's attack on an office belonging to the FDC in Nalchik, when raiders killed four of the agency's employees, looted its arsenal and set the office ablaze. Officials said some of the militants in the building had taken part in the attack in December. The siege in Nalchik followed security sweeps this week in three regions of the North Caucasus - Kabardino-Balkariya, Karachaevo-Cherkessiya and Ingushetia. More than five dozen people were detained on suspicion of extremist links and a large amount of weaponry was seized. Russia's southern provinces have been plagued by a spillover violence from Chechnya, including the school hostage-taking in the city of Beslan in nearby North Ossetia in September. Nalchik lies in the foothills of Mount Elbrus, and the rugged terrain provides a wealth of hiding places within a few hours' drive of Chechnya, where Russian troops have been fighting rebels for a decade. An official in the pro-Moscow Chechen administration said four Russian soldiers were killed in a 24-hour period in two attacks in Chechnya. Two soldiers died when a land mine they were trying to defuse exploded near Nozhai-Yurt, in the east of Chechnya, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Two others were killed and two more wounded on Jan 26 in an ambush on their convoy near Dyshny-Vedeno in the south-east, the official added. Separately, a pro-Russian Chechen policeman was wounded during a gun attack on a patrol in Shali, southeast of the regional capital, Grozny. A patrol of Russian border guards also exchanged fire with a group of rebels in the Itum-Kale region in the southern mountains on the frontier with Georgia. The clash left one border guard wounded and four rebels dead, the pro-Moscow Chechen official said.