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Russia Warns US Against Hasty Retaliation

Text: Combined Reports
Russia said on Saturday it opposed indiscriminate use of force to punish perpetrators of acts of terror after the U.S. Congress authorized strikes against those responsible for Tuesday’s attacks on the United States.

President Vladimir Putin, who has pledged Moscow's support to Washington in efforts to root out "international terrorism", said on a trip to ex-Soviet Armenia that Moscow wanted a thorough investigation
to precede any military action. "The evil must be punished," Putin told a news conference. "But we should not liken ourselves to bandits who strike from behind. We must weigh up our decisions and take action on the basis of proven facts."

Washington has said that this week's kamikaze attack on its landmarks with thousands feared dead was a declaration of war and the Congress authorized President George W. Bush on Friday to use "all necessary and appropriate force" in response.

U.S. officials say Saudi-born Islamic militant Osama bin Laden tops the list of suspects, fuelling fears that military action against Afghanistan, where the exiled millionaire lives as a guest of the hard-line ruling Taliban, was imminent.

Russia, which accuses bin Laden of feeding money and resources to separatist rebels in its southern province of Chechnya, keeps a sizeable military presence in ex-Soviet Tajikistan, an impoverished republic on the Afghan border.

Moscow used Tajikistan in 1979 to launch an ill-fated 10-year occupation of Afghanistan.

Russian spy and security agencies have said they were in contact with U.S. secret services over the attack but Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov has already dismissed the possibility of a NATO country deploying forces in ex-Soviet Central Asia.

Ivanov, who is also with Putin in Yerevan, told Itar-Tass news agency that hasty indiscriminate strikes would do little to help Washington achieve its goals. "The use of force on a large scale – carpet bombings and such like – is unlikely to solve the problem of punishing those inhumans who carried out that terrorist attack," he said.

"The right thing to do would be to discuss the issue, possibly even on a multinational level, single out the targets and plan everything carefully to carry out a really precise strike," Ivanov said.

Putin has held telephone conversations with Bush in the aftermath of Tuesday's attack and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is due in Moscow next week to discuss cooperation in dealing
with Afghanistan.

Meanwhile in Moscow on Saturday, a source in Russia’s secret service, the Federal Security Service said they believed that the radical Islamic organization Jamaat Islamia was probably behind Tuesday’s attacks in the US. The FSB suspects that the same organization was responsible for the bombing of residential blocks in Moscow and the town of Volgodonsk, Southern Russia, in 1999 that left hundreds dead.

The FSB source said that Jamaat Islamia has bases in Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2000
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