It was evacuated in December 1996 when six members of the expatriate team were assassinated during an early morning raid by an unidentified armed group.

The village was considered a neutral place, the location where the negotiations between the Chechen resistance movement and the Russian authorities were held.

It appeared to them that the possibility of obtaining guarantees of safety on behalf of the Russian authorities for the transport and the treatment of wounded in Ingushetia had not been sufficiently explored.

They recalled the Afghan context in which wounded mujahideen were transported to Kabul to the hospital of the ICRC under its protection.

It appeared strange to them to install an hospital in an area as volatile as Chechnya on mainly local criteria of safety.

The expatriates staff was immediately submitted to very intense pressures from the local authorities to recruit always more personnel among the inhabitants of the village.

On 26 September, the pressures for recruitment of ever more local staff led to the abduction of the head of office and of the expatriate administrator by the same commander who was supposed to protect the team.

The site that was provided for the hospital in Novye Atagi was an old unused school made up of several buildings distributed in a vast compound.

A second building was used as a refectory and pharmacy, the third one became a rest room for the expatriate staff, the fourth was transformed into their residence and the fifth was the workshop.

In comparison with another ICRC operation in Quetta, Pakistan, the hospital admitted 120 patients in buildings, and whole the capacity being up to 280 by using marquees.

In addition the importance and the size of the contracts entered with local contractors caused many frustrations and jealousies among them, further increasing tension.

From November onwards, security incidents in Chechnya increased in number and seriousness once the date of the upcoming presidential elections were announced.

[1] On 20 November, a delegate was abducted for a few hours by an armed group which apparently hoped to get one of their friends released by the Russians.

They left a small note whose translation said: “This here is for all the evil that you do.” At the same time, two local employees of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were kidnapped in Grozny to be released a few hours later.

During their debriefing, they explained that their kidnappers sought expatriates of the OSCE or ICRC and that if they had succeeded, the incident would have been much more serious, perhaps even murder.

During a meeting of the ICRC in Grozny, someone asked why “small” organizations were still present (an expatriate of Merlin and two of MSF France) were not mentioned.

At the Grozny delegation, the number of expatriates stationed was decreased sharply, the safety measures for travel was reinforced.

The number of expatriate personnel was slightly reduced: one position of a teaching nurse was abolished and longer absences for rest and relieve were introduced.

Through information from the Grozny office the medical team knew the hospitals in the city had started to work again.

On 17 December at around 3.30 am, a group of between five and ten men, masked and armed with silencer guns[citation needed], penetrated the enclosure of the hospital.

The guards then called the Chechen military commander of the village which arrived accompanied with armed men at around 4 o'clock hour in the morning.

[citation needed] A convoy left Novye Atagi at the end of the morning bound for Naltchik transporting the survivors and dead bodies.

The following day, 18 December, was marked by a debriefing session of the remaining 13 surviving expatriate staff of the hospital.

At the end of the day a long convoy, made up of a truck and about fifteen vehicles, left the city in direction of the airport of Mineralnyje-Vody, located at a distance of about a hundred kilometers.

By an icy cold and in the noise of the planes which land and take off, a last homage is paid to the six victims, then each one, in a slow procession, ravels in front of the coffins.

The plane takes off and a similar ceremony is organized in the night of December 19 on the tarmac of the airport of Cointrin, in Geneva, in the presence of the local authorities, members of the Committee, executives of the direction of the ICRC and representatives of the national Companies.

Shortly after the drama, some managers of the ICRC spoke about resuming the activities in Chechnya as soon as the culprits would have been identified.