MOSCOW. March 26 (Interfax) - Five gunmen, including the leader of a gang, have been killed in a counterterrorist operation in the village of Pervomaiskoye in the Khasavyurt district of Dagestan, the National Antiterrorist Committee (NAC) reports.
One Interior Ministry serviceman also died from wounds he sustained in the operation and another was injured, it said.
"Five criminals were neutralized in the armed contact. Their identities have been established preliminarily. Among them is Tural Atayev, born in 1988 in Azerbaijan, the leader of the so-called Khasavyurt gang, who was among the organizers of the terrorist attack in Pyatigorsk in December last year," the NAC said on Tuesday.
No civilians were harmed in the operation, it said.
Weapons and ammunition were found at the scene of the clash.
Security services had received information on the presence of several members of illegal armed groups in a private house in Pervomaiskoye in the course of an active search operation against people responsible for terrorist crimes in the North Caucasus, the NAC said.
The chief of the NAC operational headquarters in Dagestan decided to launch a special operation. Local Federal Security Service (FSB) and Interior Ministry units blockaded the house in which the gunmen were supposedly hiding, and the residents of the nearby house were evacuated.
The gunmen were urged to lay down their weapons. In response, they opened automatic fire on the security forces.
The NAC said Atayev's gang is responsible for "numerous attempts on the lives of law enforcement officials, extortion of large sums of money from businessmen, and the organization of bomb attacks," the NAC said.
It was reported earlier that a car parked near a furniture store in front of the Pyatigorsk town traffic police department was blown up on the evening of December 27, 2013. The blast killed three random passersby. Sources said the bomb was equivalent to about 50 kilos of TNT.
A Dagestani law enforcement source told Interfax earlier on Tuesday that four gunmen had been killed in an assault of a house in the community of Pervomaiskoye in Dagestan. The source said one security forces member was also killed and two others wounded in the operation.