Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged Sweden on Tuesday to extradite two men it says are Chechen fighters.

Sweden refused to extradite the Chechen suspects Aslan Adayev and Magomed Uspayev as recently as 2008, a refusal Russia denounced as a "political offence" at the time.

One of the most populous regions in the mainly Muslim north Caucasus Chechnya declared independency after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but was attacked by Russian forces in two wars since the mid-1990s.

At a joint news conference with visiting Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt in the Kremlin, Medvedev quickly shifted the discussion to the Chechens when the issue of human rights in the Caucasus came up.

"If we talk about the Caucasus, apart from the human rights situation there is another problem ... the bandits who found shelter in Sweden," Medvedev said.

Medvedev said he hoped a cooperation agreement signed earlier in the day between top Swedish and Russian prosecutors meant the two Chechens would be "dealt with".

Reinfeldt told the same news conference he had discussed with Medvedev the issue of human rights in the North Caucasus.

Amnesty International also said in its 2009 report on Caucasus that so-called the counter-terrorism operation that the Russian authorities declared there gave a green light tohuman right violations by government forces in Chechnya.

Kremlin critics have urged Moscow to solve the murder of Natalia Estemirova, a human rights worker in Chechnya and a vocal critic of hardline Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who was kidnapped and shot last July.

In an open letter published by Swedish daily Sydsvenskan on Tuesday, Russian human rights campaigners Tatyana Lokshina and Oleg Orlov called on Reinfeldt and Foreign Minister Carl Bildt to openly criticise Russia for rights violations in the Caucasus.

Reuters