As many as 48 people have been killed in gun battles after suspected Chechen rebels seized a government building today and stormed other key points in the neighbouring Russian region of Ingushetia.
The fighters seized Ingushetia's interior ministry building for several hours early today and attacked other top security points.
"They must be found and destroyed. Those whom it is possible to take alive must be handed over to the courts," President Vladimir Putin said angrily in comments at a Kremlin meeting with top security chiefs, shown on national television.
A Russian justice official said the rebels were trying to escape from Ingushetia into the neighbouring region of Chechnya or the independent state of Georgia after the attack.
It was the biggest armed operation by rebels in the southern Russian province since war between separatists and Moscow erupted in Chechnya a decade ago.
Ingushetia's mainly Muslim people are ethnically close to the Chechens and have occasionally suffered the spillover from the secessionist war in Chechnya, which borders it to the east.
Coming just six weeks after the assassination of Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov, this morning's daring operation dealt a further blow to Putin's assertion that the tide had turned in Moscow's favour in its nine-year battle with the separatists.
The former spy-chief came to power in 2000 by talking tough on the need to wipe out the rebels and sending in more troops.
But his failure to tame the rebels has done little to dent his popularity in the rest of Russia and he was re-elected by a landslide for another four-year term in March.
The coordinated strikes, concentrated in Ingushetia's capital Nazran, led to fierce overnight battles as security forces fought to dislodge the rebels from the ministry building.
The rebels, who also raided police arms depots and seized weapons, eventually pulled out leaving behind bodies on the streets and the burned-out shells of a police headquarters and a building housing border guards.
Tass quoted police as saying a small army of up to 200 guerrillas staged the operation, that began with rebels tricking their way into checkpoints on a main highway.
Using false documents that identified them as members of anti-crime and special service squads, they commandeered the checkpoints and then gunned down police who turned out to answer the alarm, police said, quoted by Tass.
Forty-eight people - including 25 civilians - were killed, Yakhya Khadziyev, a spokesman for the regional interior ministry, was quoted as saying by Tass.
He said the dead included the acting regional interior minister Abukar Kostoyev, who had been in the building when it was captured. Another 60 people were injured. Two rebel fighters had been killed.
A Kremlin official in the region later said however that security and police officials alone accounted for 47 dead, raising the possibility of a higher overall death toll.