WARSAW, Dec 23 (AFP) - Five Poles last seen a week ago taking aid to a village west of the Chechen capital, Grozny, have been kidnapped, the Polish Foreign Affairs Ministry confirmed Tuesday.

Ministry spokesman Pawel Dobrowolsky said the Poles' truck had been found last Thursday with its front tyres riddled with bullet holes on a road between the village of Samashka and Grozny.

The rest of the vehicle was untouched and no traces of blood were found on or near it, indicating that the five occupants might still be alive, Dobrowolsky said.

The five men were last seen in Grozny on Wednesday. "We still don't know who kidnapped them or why," the spokesman told AFP. "We can presume that, as in similar incidents, a ransom will be demanded."

Since the end of the Chechen war in August 1996, around 50 people have been kidnapped, mainly English, Swiss and Hungarians.

The Polish press reported that two of the five men had met with the former Chechen president Zeli Khan Yandarbiyev.

Their trip to take food supplies, medicines and furniture to Samashka, one of the villages hardest hit in the war, was organised by a Caritas branch run by the archbishop of the northern Polish city of Gdansk.

Polish newspapers identified the men as Marek Kurzyniec, Dominik Piaskowski, Marcin Thiele, Krzysztof Galinski and Pawel Chojnacki.

Those men are well-known friends of the Chechen nation. Pawel Chojnacki and Marek Kurzyniec organized during the war in Chechnya many protestation and supporting activities in Poland (among others, some humanitarian convoys to Chechnya). They had met personally, as guests, with Dzhochar Dudayev before his death. Also other persons are pro-Chechen activists.

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Jacek Sierpinski

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