CIS SECURITY SERVICES TO HOLD ANTITERROR EXERCISES IN ARMENIA

ITAR-TASS, Russia
Sept 25 2006

MOSCOW, September 25 (Itar-Tass) – Security services of the Collective
Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) countries will be held at the
Armenian nuclear power plant on September 26-29, the CIS Antiterrorist
Centre’s chief Colonel-General Boris Mylnikov said.

He told reporters on Monday that the Atom – Antiterror 2006
operative-strategic exercises would be a drill of planning and
conducting the search "to reveal and destroy sabotage groups that
infiltrated the territory of Armenia and seized a nuclear power plant
in the city of Metsamor".

Workers of the Armenian National Security Service and the Russian
Federal Security Service’s Special Task Centre will act as "terrorists"
secretly moving in Armenia, Mylnikov said.

He said that antiterrorists divisions of CIS security services would
hold the exercises of this scale for the first time jointly with the
allied headquarters of the CSTO and Armenian army units that are a
part of the CSTO Collective Rapid Deployment Forces.

The Armenian National Security Service and antiterrorist units of the
FSB Special Task Centre will play a main role in the exercises. When
"terrorists" are spotted, the Armenian army’s motorised infantry
battalion of the Collective Rapid Deployment Forces in the
Trans-Caucasus and two companies of special forces will join the
action, Mylnikov said.

Representatives of G8 countries, the antiterrorist division of the
OSCE Secretariat, the counter-terrorist committee of the UN Security
Council, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation’s Regional Antiterrorist Structure have been invited to
the exercises in a capacity of observers.

"Azerbaijan has refused to participate in the exercises considering
the complex relations with Armenia because of a lack of settlement
of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem," Mylnikov said.