Baku–Rostov highway bombing
The Baku–Rostov highway bombing was an incident which occurred near the village of Shaami-Yurt in Chechnya, on October 29, 1999. Two low-flying Russian aircraft carried out repeated rocket attacks on a large convoy of refugees trying to enter the Russian republic of Ingushetia through a supposed "safe exit" route. The attacks killed or injured scores of people.
Incident
The incident took place after it was officially announced that the border between Chechnya and Ingushetia would re-open following a week's closure. However, the convoy of more than 1,000 vehicles heading to safety was not permitted to cross the border and ordered to turn back by an unidentified senior Russian military officer, and subsequently attacked on their way back to the besieged Chechen capital Grozny.According to the Amnesty International report, "at the time of the Russian attacks there were no legitimate military targets in the area. Eyewitness accounts of this incident would seem to indicate that the Russian forces had deliberately targeted civilians and civilian objects, despite some of them being marked with the Red Cross emblem, in violation of international humanitarian law."
The victims included local International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement workers, two killed Chechen journalists, and numerous women and children, some of them reportedly burned alive while trapped in their vehicles. Russian authorities have at first officially denied responsibility, and the later military investigations were not meaningful.