GROZNY. Oct 28 (Interfax-AVN) - Chechen administration head Akhmad Kadyrov has called on rebel fighters to lay down their arms immediately and surrender to law enforcement agencies.
"In this case I guarantee your safety on behalf of the country's leadership if there is no criminal blood on your hands. You will have documents and help in finding jobs. If you do not surrender, you will be killed because terrorism will be fought by the toughest possible methods," he said.
Kadyrov called on separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov to publicly repent and ask the Chechen people for forgiveness. "If he succeeds in proving his innocence of terrorist attacks, he will be he said.
The terrorists who took over a Moscow theater on October 23 had nothing to do with Islam, as the entire world has seen, Kadyrov said. "A Muslim woman cannot even go to Mecca without a husband, father or brother accompanying her while these put on explosives- filled belts, took hostages and all the while insisted that they were acting in the name of Islam," he said.
It was thanks to the will and resolution of Russian President Vladimir Putin that the hostage crisis was resolved, Kadyrov said.
Kadyrov thanked the people of Chechnya for their strong denouncement of the terrorists and the moral support they had given to the national administration in the release of the hostages in Moscow.
Nearly all residents of Chechnya and members of the diaspora voiced their support of the efforts of the authorities from the very start, he stressed. "Sporadic rallies were held throughout Chechnya. 1,000 people attended each rally for the first time over the recent years to openly denounce the organizers and perpetrators of the terrorist act," Kadyrov said.
"Being in the operative staff set up at the Chechen office in Moscow, I kept receiving telephone calls from St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl, Saratov and other cities. Local Chechens offered themselves as substitutes for the members of the audience of the musical who were taken hostage," the head of the Chechen administration said.
Dozens of Chechen policemen asked to be sent to Moscow to take part in the rescue operation, Kadyrov said.
He said he had maintained a permanent contact with Putin and returned from Moscow to Grozny the night before the hostage-release operation to fulfill Putin's instruction. "No one could act on their own at that moment. Being the head of the republican administration, I did what the president had told me to do," Kadyrov said.