Locate and destroy killers of diplomats, orders Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered special services to take all measures necessary to "locate and destroy" those responsible for the deaths of four Russian diplomats in Iraq, the Kremlin said.

"Russia will be grateful for any information about the criminals who killed our citizens in Iraq," Putin said in Moscow during a meeting with visiting Saudi Arabian Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud on Wednesday, according to the Kremlin.

Director of the Federal Security Service Nikolai Patrushev said he had received instructions from the president to track down the terrorists responsible for the killings.

Russian special forces will make every effort to bring the murderers to justice, Patrushev told reporters in Moscow.

"We should be working so that not a single terrorist responsible for the crime will escape responsibility," said Patrushev, adding that "we will go on working no matter how much time and effort is needed."

Also on Wednesday, Russia's upper house, the State Duma, passed a statement saying the occupying countries are to be blamed for the killings.

The statement asked "Iraqi authorities and the occupying countries" to conduct "a thorough and profound investigation of the murder of the Russian citizens in Iraq" and insisted that all necessary measures should be taken to arrest and punish the criminals.

The Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed the deaths of the four diplomats, kidnapped on June 3 in Baghdad, on Monday, a day after the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of several insurgent groups in Iraq including the al-Qaida terror network, said in an Internet statement that it had carried out the killings.

In another development, Iraqi security forces found 60 abducted workers of Baiji refinery in a valley yesterday after the kidnappers freed them all but the driver, a police source said.

"We have found them in one of Hemrin valleys after the kidnappers checked their identifications before they released them," said the source from the provincial Salahudin police.

The bus driver, however, was taken away by the kidnappers, the source said.

The workers were Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds, the source said, adding that all of them were from the multiple-ethnic town of Tuz Khurmato, some 90 kilometres east of the northern city of Tikrit.

Earlier, a Tuz Khurmato police source said that unknown gunmen abducted up to 60 workers of Baiji refinery after they ambushed a bus near the Hemrin mountain area in northern Iraq.

The kidnappers burned the bus after they took the driver and the workers to the mountainous area, the source said.

Iraqi security forces cordoned off the area and launched a search campaign in the wake of the abduction.

Source: China Daily