GROZNY. Nov 18 (Interfax-South) - Two International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) employees who were freed in Chechnya on Sunday evening have thanked local law enforcement bodies for the successful rescue operation.
"If it wasn't for these guys, we don't know what would have happened to us later," Alexander Panov and Musa Satushiyev told Interfax on Monday.
They said that after being abducted on Wednesday they were kept in basements of buildings in the villages of Raduzhnoye and Dolinskoye. "Force was not used against us a single time. We were not treated badly. The guards wore masks all the time. They spoke to us in perfect Russian and talked in Chechen amongst themselves. We were moved from one place to another three times. We were not once told the motives for the abduction. There were no demands for a ransom or anything else," they said.
During their rescue operation they heard intensive shooting.
In his turn chief of the Grozny interior department Khalid Sulumov told Interfax that a special operation was planned to free the ICRC employees during which the contractors and perpetrators of the abduction were identified.
"We simulated the situation. At that stage we put forward the objective of freeing the hostages. We deducted everyone beginning with the contractor and ending with the abductors and guards. We used all our contacts, beginning with imams of mosques and ending with drug addicts to establish their whereabouts. The people who abducted the Red Cross employees had been engaged in the business for a long time. They are on the federal and local wanted lists," Sulumov said.
Deputy head of the Chechen administration Movsar Khamidov told reporters on Sunday that the hostages were freed without any ransom being paid and the suspected abductors were arrested.
Panov and Satushiyev were abducted by masked gunmen on Wednesday on a highway between Pobedinskoye and Goragorsky near Grozny. Two other employees were allowed to leave.
The ICRC employees were accompanying a convoy of three vehicles returning to Ingushetia after delivering humanitarian aid to the Chechen capital. They had worked as ICRC truck drivers for several years in Nalchik.