At least 396 Chechen residents were abducted in 2004, and 175 of them are still missing, the Memorial human rights center told Interfax on Thursday. \"According to the latest reports, 396 people were abducted in Chechen territory in 2004, and 187 of them were released, 24 found killed, and 175 have gone missing. Another 10 people who were presumed to have been abducted, are currently under investigation,\" Dmitry Grushkin of Memorial said. Another 293 locals were found killed in Chechnya last year, according to human rights workers, he said. \"Among them are 114 civilians, 101 officers from Chechen law enforcement agencies, 7 public officials, and 36 guerillas. Another 35 people have still not been identified,\" Grushkin said. Memorial workers monitored the observance of human rights on 25% to 30% of Chechen territory in 2004, having no access to the mountainous regions, he said. \"Therefore, the real scale of crimes against civilian population can be several times larger,\" he said. Meanwhile, the Chechen authorities confirmed that the observance of human rights in the republic is not improving as dynamically as it should. \"Improvement of the situation surrounding human rights is our priority, but this problem is not being resolved as quickly as we would like it to, in particular, because of the difficulties in the socioeconomic sector that are still in place,\" Secretary of the Chechen Security Council Rudnik Dudayev earlier told Interfax. Chechen Prime Minister Sergei Abramov earlier stated that, to uproot abductions, anyone involved in them, be it guerillas or law enforcers, must be punished. \"We are all talking about this, and even a single case of disappearance of a person is a very serious and alarming occasion for the region. We take all such cases into consideration,\" Abramov said at a press conference in Moscow in December. (Interfax)