MOSCOW, June 28 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's Constitutional Court has upheld a ban on handing over bodies of gunmen classed by authorities as terrorists to relatives for burial, a RIA Novosti correspondent reported from the courtroom Thursday.
The law forbids authorities to return terrorists' bodies to their families, or to inform them of the place of burial.
"The rules set out in the federal law on burials are in line with the Russian Constitution," the court said in a statement. "They are applied in Russia as part of the fight against terrorism, exclusively toward people against whom prosecution is dropped due to their death, caused by retaliatory action to prevent or counter their terrorist attacks."
The court thereby overturned an appeal filed by Yelena Karmova and Kunak Guzeyev, whose sons were killed in a police operation in Nalchik, in Russia's North Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, in October 2005 after a large group of armed separatists attacked the city, killing 35 policemen and 12 civilians, and wounding over 100 people.
The plaintiffs said the law violated freedom of religion and burial rules stipulated by their faith. They also said the ban extended to suspects and even unidentified persons, in violation of a fundamental principle of justice - assumption of innocence - which says people cannot be called terrorists without being tried in a court of law, and without a corresponding court ruling.
They said the refusal to return the bodies was tantamount to political reprisals and "a form of collective intimidation and punishment."
But Yelena Mizulina, representing the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, at the court session, said the law was designed to prevent terrorists from being turned into martyrs for their faith and their tombs into places of their worship.
The lawmaker cited similar rules in the United States, which does not hand over terrorists' bodies, and buries them in strict secrecy, and the Netherlands, which withholds the bodies if their burial could be used as terrorist propaganda, as well as examples in other countries.
An Interior Ministry official, Nadezhda Tuzlukova, said a memorial built where Chechen separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev died was used for meetings when militants in Russia's troubled North Caucasus region vowed to avenge his death.
But the president's representative in the Constitutional Court, prominent lawyer Mikhail Barshchevsky, said these people should be buried in accordance with the rituals of their faith.
In 2005, police and troops killed about 95 gunmen in Nalchik. They all were declared terrorists by authorities. Their bodied were cremated a year ago, and the burial place has not been disclosed.
This is the second such appeal to the Constitutional Court from families of those classed as terrorists after the Nalchik attack. The previous appeal was overturned in spring 2006.
Russia's domestic security service FSB said Wednesday a militant killed earlier in the day in Nalchik was involved in apartment bombings in Moscow and the southern city of Volgodonsk in 1999, which killed hundreds of people and led to Russia's second anti-terrorism campaign in Chechnya.
The FSB also said Ruslan Odizhev had been on the wanted list for allegedly taking part in the 2005 armed attack on Nalchik, and who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and been held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo.
