A permanent session of the Stavropol territorial court for the Caucasian spas opened hearings in Pyatigorsk yesterday on the case of Ramses Gaichayev.

Gaichayev, 21, of Chervlennaya village in the Shelkovsky district, Chechnya, is charged with genocide, Clause 357 of Russia's Criminal Code.

Gaichayev and his four accomplices have cruelly murdered ten Russian residents of his village since autumn 1997, says the investigation.

Ramses Gaichayev was first detained by Chechnya's Shari'a security officers on suspected homicide in 1998, when Aslan Maskhadov was ruling Chechnya. He was awaiting trial when federal troops came close to Grozny, and paramilitaries released all criminal suspects from the city detention prison.

In December 1999, Gaichayev was arrested by federals in Tolstoy Yurt, a Grozny suburbia. Investigators of the federal Prosecutor-General's board for the North Caucasus were tackling his case.

As the board press spokesman informed [the Moscow-based daily] Segodnya, Gaichayev led a gang of four young men of Chervlennaya. One of them, Rustam Khalidov, 22, has been arrested. The gang was hunting Russian fellow-villagers to kill seven old men, two women and a child of ten. All victims were strangled, and the women raped before they met their death. The last crime, of April 1999, was the only exception from the gory pattern, when the gang broke into the house of the Yakimochkin man and wife, both teachers at the local boarding school, and machine-gunned them.

After the murders, the gangsters ransacked and put on fire the victims' houses.

Gaichayev pleaded innocent. "I wasn't doing anything bad - jus' killing Russians," he shrugged after his arrest in December 1999.

If his guilt is proved, Gaichayev can expect a death verdict.

Russian law courts have never yet heard genocide cases. Gaichayev's is the first.

Andrei Victorov