CIS security services to hold antiterror exercises in Armenia

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.

/Itar-Tass/