[ Ссылка ] MOSCOW -- Armed men have launched an attack on the local parliament in the Russian region of Chechnya, leaving at least six people dead, officials say.
A suicide bomber reportedly detonated explosives outside the building in Grozny, the Chechen capital, on Tuesday morning as deputies arrived for work.
Suspected separatist fighters then went on a shooting spree inside the building.
The death toll is so far unclear, with some reports suggesting three security guards or two policeman and a civilian may have been killed.
An interior ministry official was quoted by local news agencies as saying that an unspecified number of guards at the parliament had been killed and an aide to the speaker had been wounded in the attack.
Separatists have been fighting for independence in the mainly Muslim province of Chechnya and the neighbouring regions of Dagestan and Ingushetia.
Local leaders say it is fuelled by desperate poverty, clan rivalries, rampant corruption and heavy-handed tactics by law-enforcement agencies.
Following Tuesday's shootout, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, said all parliament deputies were alive and had been removed from the parliament.
He said Chechen security forces had staged a 20-minute operation to kill the fighters and free parliament employees from the building.
"All the militants who attacked the Chechen parliament have been killed by government forces," Zelim Yakhikhanov, a spokesman for the parliament, told the AFP news agency.
"The operation is over and all the terrorists were liquidated, according to the Chechen interior ministry."
Yakhikhanov said he witnessed four or five attackers in the building.
A security source told the Interfax news agency that "special units of interior ministry troops, riot police and the Chechen presidential security service" had arrived to regain control of the situation.
The attack was also symbolic as it came amid high security as the Russian interior minister visited Grozny.
"It's a slap in the face for Ramzan Kadyrov," Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Centre in Moscow told the AFP news agency.
"The war is not finished if you can seize the parliament in the centre of the city. All Ramzan's claims of victory over rebels are worthless."
The Kremlin is struggling to contain an uprising in the North Caucasus, an area of impoverished, ethnically mixed provinces along predominantly Orthodox Christian Russia's southern border.
Russia declared victory in its battle with Chechen separatists following two wars in the 1990s, but analysts say a wave of shootings and bombings over recent months show it has failed to tame the violence.
In 2002 Chechen separatists seized a theatre in Moscow, holding 850 people hostage and demanding an end to the war. Around 120 hostages died.
In September 2004, armed men demanding Chechen independence seized a school in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia, near Chechnya, resulting in the death of 330 people, more than half of them children.
Earlier this year two female suicide bombers killed 39 at two crowded Moscow metro stations, an attack that Doku Umarov, the Chechen separatist leader, claimed responsibility for.
