Police kill at least 12 Chechen rebels after raid

Chechen authorities said that police killed 12 rebels as they repulsed a raid on the Moscow-backed president's home village on Sunday an attack that broke a period of relative calm in the troubled Russian republic.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov told state-run Rossiya-24 TV he headed the operation to fight off the attack on his village of Tsentoroi and said 12 insurgents were killed. His office also confirmed his account of the raid.

Some 30 rebels attacked the village early on Sunday morning, a source in the North Caucasus Federal District police in the nearby Stavropol region, told RIA news agency. Only a few rebels shooting a video of the raid managed to escape, it said.

Five civilians and two policemen were also killed in the attack, RIA said, but it said it could not immediately confirm the toll of 12 rebel dead cited by Kadyrov and his office

Kadyrov, himself a former Chechen rebel, has been the target of a number of assassination attempts in the past 10 years, and Tsentoroi was raided by insurgents back in 2004, in what Kadyrov said was an attack aimed to kill him.