By empty (1/18/2005 issue of the CACI Analyst)

The Saudi Arabian Embassy in Baku released a statement on 18 January rejecting as untrue media reports blaming the embassy for the inability of a group of would-be pilgrims from Azerbaijan to perform the hajj. The statement pointed out that the people in question were refused Saudi Arabian visas because they had not received endorsement from the Muslim Spiritual Board of the Caucasus, which has a quota of 2,500 pilgrims from Azerbaijan. The statement further accused Rafig Aliev, chairman of the Azerbaijan State Committee for Religious Affairs, of organizing the 10 January protest outside the embassy by those would-be pilgrims who had been refused visas.

By empty (1/18/2005 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Protests against the monetization of in-kind benefits continued on 18 January in various Russian cities for the 10th consecutive day. In Moscow Oblast there have been 24 unauthorized rallies involving some 10,000 people in 14 districts since 9 January. St.

By empty (1/18/2005 issue of the CACI Analyst)

Alena Morozova, who survived a 1999 terrorist explosion in her Moscow apartment building, has been granted political asylum in the United States after claiming that her investigations into the possibility that the Federal Security Service (FSB) carried out the bombing had put her life in danger. Morozova\'s lawyer, former FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin, was sentenced to four years\' imprisonment by a Moscow court in May, in what many believe was a trumped-up case intended to punish him for attempting to implicate the FSB in the 1999 bombings. \"I know the material collected by Trepashkin, for which he is being persecuted by the Russian government, would leave even the most skeptical bureaucrat in the [U.