BOSTON, Massachusetts -- The American photographer killed during Russia's military assault on the separatist republic of Chechnya spoke Russian, was descended from people who lived in Russia, and once tutored immigrants from Russia in English.


Cynthia Elbaum, 28, a native of Ashfield, Massachusetts, was killed in an air attack Thursday morning on a residential neighborhood in the Chechen capital of Grozny.


"She told me she thought she would be going back and forth (to Russia) for the rest of her life," said Wilson Beebe, a friend of Elbaum's from high school. "She felt some connection with the whole area."


In Moscow, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman expressed condolences to Elbaum's family. Grigory Karasin also urged other journalists "leave the zone of military activity in Chechnya for considerations of personal safety and move to quieter regions of the Russian Federation.


"(We) in the Russian Foreign Ministry were shocked to learn about the death of an American journalist and express our deepest condolences to her family, her next of kin, her colleagues," Karasin said, in a statement carried by Interfax.


Elbaum lived in New York but had made at least six trips to Russia in the past 10 years, said her mother, Jude Elbaum, of Ashfield, about 150 kilometers west of Boston.


The great-granddaughter of a native of Russia, Elbaum earned a degree in Russian studies from Smith College in 1988. The next year, she studied the language in Moscow for six months.


Since then she had worked in Russia as a freelance photographer. In November her photographs of patients in the emergency room of Moscow's Sklifosovsky Hospital were published in The Moscow Times.


On Thursday, 12 jets dropped bombs on Grozny in the third straight day of air raids. After one strike, a Russian jet fired into a crowd that had stopped to look at the damage. Twenty people were killed in that attack. Elbaum was decapitated in a rocket blast.


"I want to get her body home," Mrs. Elbaum said, her voice choked with tears. She was still absorbing the news of her daughter's death, and was upset that U.S. State Department officials did not know whether her daughter's body could be brought home.