Three multiple hijackings in the past six months have turned a prime Caucasus resort spot into a center of terrorism in Russia, and authorities said Wednesday that they do not expect the situation to improve any time soon.


Police apprehended three gunmen as they tried to escape with millions of dollars in ransom money after taking 40 hostages in the south Russian spa town of Mineralniye Vody. A police spokesman reached by telephone in the town said all the hostages were safe, the same result as in similar incidents in May and December. It was the eighth such incident in the region in the past six years.


Spokesmen for both the Interior Ministry and the former KGB said in interviews in Moscow that they expected more hijackings in the resort town on the fringe of the Caucasus, the most volatile region in the former Soviet Union.


"In that region, I can say that such attempts will not stop," said Alexander Zdanovich, a spokesman for the KGB's successor, the Federal Counterintelligence Service.


Mineralniye Vody was declared an emergency zone in President Boris Yeltsin's recent decree on fighting crime. The resort is located less than 150 kilometers from ethnic conflicts in neighboring Ingushetia and Ossetia to the southeast and the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict to the southwest, which Zdanovich said made it easier for the hijackers to get hold of weapons.


The conflicts in the region also have a psychological effect, he said, making criminals believe the authorities are less vigilant about crime.


Interior Ministry spokesman Yury Reshetnik agreed, saying that the region's conflicts had created a new kind of criminal.


"These young people are no longer people, but pitbulls," Reshetnik said. "They've tasted blood, they have weapons, and they no longer need work, Christianity or morality. In those conditions, criminals think they can do whatever they want."


Zdanovich added that the proximity of the breakaway republic of Chechnya made terrorists think they would be able to escape over the border into the self-declared independent territory.


Both Zdanovich and Reshetnik said that there were not enough police to prevent future terrorist actions in the regions.


"If you put guards on a bus, then they'll take hostages at kindergartens," Reshetnik said, referring to an incident last December when gunmen seized 12 teenage schoolchildren in the nearby city of Rostov and fled with them to Mineralniye Vody.


While police and security officials appeared stumped as to how to put a stop to terrorism in the region, Defense Minister Pavel Grachev was quoted Wednesday as saying during a tour of south Russia that military forces may take up fighting crime in the region if local authorities fail to accomplish the task, Reuters reported.