ANKARA, Jan 18 (AFP-NT) - About 25,000 people of Chechen origin live in Turkey, where a pro-Chechen armed group has seized a ferry on the Bosphorus with more than 160 passengers on board and threatened to blow it up. They are among an estimated 2.5 million citizens whose forebears hailed from the north Caucasus, arriving towards the end of the Ottoman Empire during the "great exile" of 1860-1864. The exodus started after the Russians in 1859 arrested Sheikh Shamil, military and religious leader of the Dagestanis. He organised the resistance of the people of the Caucasus against the tsars. The largest of those immigrant communities comprises Abkhazians and the Adygei people, according to Suleyman Yancotural, who belongs to that ethnic group and is deputy chairman of a Caucasian cultural association based here. He said there were four or five times more of them abroad, mostly in Turkey, than in their native land. There are also Ossetians and Circassians, and the Chechens, who settled in the provinces on Konya, Sivas and Maras. With its oil and natural gas, the Caucasus had become "a pawn in the chess game of the big powers", Yancotural said. AFP /AA1234/171324 GMT JAN 96

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