There have been more reports of Russian soldiers killing civilians in the Chechen capital Grozny.

The Associated Press news agency quotes a forty-year-old Chechen woman Kheida Makhayuri, now in hospital in Ingushetia, as saying that she and two other women were blindfolded and shot from behind by Russian soldiers they had found stealing mattresses from an apartment building.

The woman said her companions were killed instantly but she was hit in the shoulder and pretended to be dead while the soldiers ripped her earrings off.

The New York based Human Rights Watch group has documented eight incidents in the Staropromyslovsky district of Grozny in which it says a total of twenty-two civilians were killed by Russian troops.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service