By
The Associated Press
NAZRAN, Russia - Surgeons wearing bulletproof vests gingerly removed a live grenade from the leg of a Russian soldier wounded in Chechnya, doctors said yesterday.
The grenade broke Pvt. Andrian Chebodayev's left thigh bone and stuck in his leg without exploding.
Doctors considered amputation - which would have reduced the possibility of an explosion - but then decided to try to remove the grenade, surgeons said on Russia's RTR television station.
"The feeling was, well, this is our job, there's no other way," said surgeon Igor Pesikin.
"The fuse could have gone off, and the fuse was situated so that the slightest bump or movement of the bone could have led to an explosion," said military doctor Andrei Tikhnayakov.
The surgery was performed in a fortified pit at a field hospital in Khankala, on the outskirts of the Chechen capital Grozny, according to RTR and the ITAR-Tass news agency. The reports didn't say when it occurred.
Doctors had no protection other than bulletproof vests, said Pesikin.
After the hour-long surgery, Chebodayev was flown to a hospital in Vladikavkaz, the capital of the nearby Russian republic of North Ossetia, RTR reported.
Meanwhile, an official of the pro-Russian government in Chechnya was ambushed and shot to death by rebels, a government spokesman said yesterday, in the latest of a string of assassinations of Chechens who work for Moscow.
Bukora Akhmadov, head of administration in the village of Oktyabrskoye, was shot 12 times Saturday by attackers who stopped his car, spokesman Alexander Machevsky said.
The Russian military claims that rebel resistance has been all but crushed after a year of fighting, but the rebels show no sign of giving up their struggle for independence and mount almost daily attacks on the federal forces.
