Total of 48 bodies found in mass graves by Chechen capital

"Most of the victims were rebels," Moscow's chief prosecutor for Chechnya, Vsevolod Chernov, said after the search for more bodies was called off. Most of the men died of gunshot wounds and appear to have been buried in the past year, Chernov told Russian news agencies.

The first corpses were found last weekend in a ruined settlement of cottages near the city, and prompted speculation that they were Chechens who "vanished" after being detained by the Russian military. Ilyas Akhmadov, the ousted Chechen government's "foreign minister", said in a press release this week that the graves also contained bodies of women and children and were more evidence that "Russian crimes against the Chechen people are systematic and deliberate".

Federal investigators meanwhile found "no trace" of a brutal detention camp Russian war reporter Anna Politkovskaya claimed troops set up for civilians in Chechnya, Chernov said. "We discovered none of the things the journalist told of," Chernov stressed. Politkovskaya, who works for the respected investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, claimed male and female detainees were kept in pits in the earth near the southern Chechen village of Khatuni, 50 kilometres south east of Grozny.

Some were beaten by members of the 45th Russian paratroop regiment, she said, and people had to pay ransoms of up to 500 dollars for the release of their relatives from the camp. Politkovskaya was herself detained by the Russian military last week for supposedly having incomplete accreditation for the strictly controlled region as she researched the story, but was later released.

After returning from a tour of the republic, the European Council's commissioner for human rights, Alvaro Gil-Robles, called for a through investigation of harsh treatment of Chechen civilians by the Russian forces. "I have seen many violations of human rights in Chechnya," the Spanish official said in Moscow Friday.

(la/dpa)