MOSCOW, Nov. 8 (UPI) -- Salman Raduyev, the best-known Chechen warlord captured by Russian troops, will stand trial next Thursday in Chechnya's neighboring province of Dagestan, the official RIA Novosti news agency reported Thursday.
Dagestan's Supreme Court judge Baguzha Unzholov, who will preside over the trial, the agency said, set the Nov. 15 trial date.
Besides Raduyev, his three accomplices also will stand in the dock on charges of organizing and participating in the rebels' hostage-taking raid on the Dagestani town of Kizlyar and Pervomaiskoe village in January 1996.
Then, the rebels took hostage thousands of local civilians at a Kizlyar hospital and later were besieged by the Russian troops as they retreated through Pervomaiskoe.
The Russian army attacked the village five days later, inflicting casualties among both the rebels and villagers taken hostage. Sixty-nine people, including 26 civilians, died in the exchange of fire as Raduyev's rebels mysteriously broke through the triple perimeter and returned to Chechnya.
Raduyev masterminded the raid, which was designed to send a message to Moscow that Chechen terrorism would make Russia vulnerable even beyond the separatist province's borders.
Raduyev, a loud-talking loyalist to Chechnya's independence leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, became known for his anti-Russian sentiments and open threats to the Kremlin.
In his verbal escapades taped on video and freely distributed, Raduyev often attributed to himself even those crimes against the Russian troops that he had not committed.
Once, he threatened to blow up a nuclear power plant in southern Russia.
In 1997, Raduyev organized blasts at two southern Russian railroad stations and a year later was suspected of being behind an assassination attempt on Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
Russia's law enforcement agencies put Raduyev on their wanted list and finally managed to capture the rebel in March 2000.
Since then, the notorious warlord has been spending time locked up in a prison cell in Moscow's Lefortovo prison awaiting trial.
Russia's Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov will head prosecution.
The decision on the venue of the trial had been delayed because Dagestan seemed too dangerous a place for holding the trial with the victims' relatives threatening to take revenge on Raduyev in the courtroom. Local authorities in the Dagestani capital, Makhachkala, pledged to ensure safety during the court proceedings.
