VILNIUS - An offer of $20 million for assistance in detaining Russian President Vladimir Putin, transmitted from a Lithuania-based Web site, has provoked an international scandal and led to the Lithuanian ambassador to Russia being summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow.
On Sept. 8 an Internet Web site, kavkazcenter.com, posted the appeal of a little-known pro-Chechen independence organization, the Anti-terrorist Center of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, which is part of the State Defense Council of the Chechen Republic, pledging to pay the grandiose sum for any help in capturing the Russian president.
The message blames Putin for organizing the murder of hundreds of thousands of Chechen civilians and claims he is responsible for the tragic events in Beslan.
Russia did not take long to respond. On Sept. 12 ministry officials in Moscow summoned Lithuanian Ambassador Rimantas Sidlauskas to lodge an official complaint.
"I heard Russia's official discontent about the Internet site functioning in Lithuania, and they expressed their hope that Lithuanian authorities would react upon the matter," Sidlauskis told the national television channel LRT.
Founded in 1999, the Kavkazcenter agency reports on events in Russia, the Chechen Republic, and Islamic countries, while also publishing material from the Chechen separatists.
The rebels published their appeal one day after Russia announced its own commitment to pay $10 million for information that would lead to the detention of Shamil Basayev and former Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, who are still at large in the mountains of the northern Caucasus.
Still, Lithuanian security forces had already begun to investigate the site before Russia expressed its dismay.
On Sep. 9, the State Security Department of Lithuania asked the Journalists and Publishers Ethics Commission to decide whether the controversial site incited ethnic hatred.
According to the department, information on the site could be regarded as international terrorist propaganda.
"Our main concern is that the publication is transmitted from an Internet station based in Lithuania," the department said in a statement. "Recent events in the world indicate that problems with international terrorism are becoming more acute; therefore, the indirect hints encouraging terrorism ideas drive us to search for responses to such publications."
