Putin fires high-level police officials
President Vladimir Putin has fired six deputy interior ministers including a top officer in the violence-plagued southern Russian region, the Kremlin said today.
The sacked Interior Ministry officials included the head of the department of economic and tax crimes and the chief of the ministry’s internal investigation department, the Kremlin said in a statement.
The Kremlin gave no motives for Putin’s order, but the president has been highly critical of the nation's corruption-ridden law enforcement agencies following the terrorist seizure of a school in Besland in southern Russia in September.
Some 330 people were killed, about half of them children, in a hail of explosions and gunfire on the third day of the stand-off between the hostage-takers and police and security forces that had surrounded the school.
Putin named two new deputy ministers.
