MOSCOW - A Russian court handed down life sentences on Monday to two men accused of bombing an apartment block in 1999 in the first of a series of attacks that brought on war in rebel Chechnya.
The Supreme Court of the region of Dagestan, which borders on Chechnya, also imposed prison terms on four other co-conspirators in the September, 1999 bombing of a military apartment building in the Dagestani town of Buinaksk.
That bombing was the first in a three-week wave of four blasts in Russian cities that Russian officials blamed on separatists. The blasts were the main justification for a full-scale military assault on Chechnya which came within days.
Almost 60 people were killed and more than 100 injured in the Buinaksk blast, at a time when Chechen-backed Islamic rebels were fighting Russian troops in several villages of Dagestan.
An official at the Dagestan Supreme Court told Reuters by telephone that the court had sentenced Isa Zainudinov and Alisultan Salikhov to life for the blast.
Two other men, Abdulkadyr Abdulkadyrov and Magomed Magomedov were given nine year sentences. Another two, Zainudin Zainudinov and Makhach Abdusametov, were given three year sentences and immediately freed under a standing amnesty for brief jail terms.
Court officials were not available to comment.
Russian officials have linked the Buinaksk bombing to the three later blasts two in Moscow and one in the southern town of Volgadonsk - in which a total of nearly 250 people died. But nobody has been charged in those other attacks.
Chechen rebels have denied involvement in all four blasts. The apartment blasts built a wave of public support for the return of Russian troops to Chechnya and for the aggressive policies of then newly-appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Russian troops had quit Chechnya after a humiliating defeat in a 1994-96 war with separatists, but Putin sent them back following the bomb blasts in a new bid to bring the region to heel. The campaign helped catapult him to the presidency.
Russian forces have since recaptured virtually all Chechen territory after flattening the capital Grozny and other towns and villages. Moscow has set up an administration of loyalist Chechens and says it wants to rebuild the region.
But Russian forces have failed to restore peace, and troops continue to die each week in rebel attacks.
About 3,000 Russian troops and unknown numbers of civilians and rebels have died in 18 months of fighting. Nearly 200,000 Chechen refugees have yet to return home.