Notorious Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev is killed

EKAZHEVO, Russia — All day long, Russia's state-run news channels broadcast footage of the debris of a truck explosion that killed a few alleged Chechen rebels planning to pull off a terror attack in southern Russia.

It looked like just another skirmish in Moscow's 12-year-old fight against the separatists, with the usual anonymous dead rebels, until a tense-looking intelligence chief told an equally tense-looking President Vladimir Putin in a televised meeting that Russia's most wanted terrorist had been killed.

Radical warlord Shamil Basayev's trail of destruction came to an end in a muddy field in a province bordering Chechnya. An explosives-filled truck in his convoy blew up, reportedly leaving his body in tatters.

Russia's NTV television said Basayev's death held a significance for Russia similar to what killing al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden would mean for the United States.

Basayev claimed responsibility for the 1995 kidnapping of roughly 1,000 hostages at a hospital in Budyonnovsk, the seizure of a Moscow theater containing some 800 people in 2002 and the grisly siege of a school in Beslan two years ago.

The Chechen guerrillas have fought two full-scale wars with an often-brutal Russian army in the past 11 years and recently have sought to spread instability and violence across other republics of the northern Caucasus region.

Basayev, 41, was emblematic of the radicalization of the Chechen rebel movement — which began as a secular fight for independence — and its increasing domination by Islamic extremists. His death, while a huge victory for Putin's fight against terrorism, will probably not end an insurgency that has spread across Russia's predominantly Muslim south.

Basayev died along with three other militants in this small village of red-brick houses in Ingushetia, a republic plagued by sporadic spillover violence from Chechnya.

Russia's security chief, Nikolai Patrushev, said that Basayev and other Chechen insurgents had been planning a terrorist attack to "put political pressure on Russia's leadership" during the three-day Group of Eight summit of heads of state from the world's leading industrialized nations — including President Bush — which is scheduled to begin Saturday in St. Petersburg.

Patrushev said the explosion that killed the Chechen leader took place during a special operation. A statement on a rebel Web site confirmed Basayev's death but said he was killed "when a truck carrying explosives spontaneously blew up," and not as the result of a Russian operation.

The explosion also killed Ali Taziyev, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, citing the Federal Security Service. Taziyev was reportedly a former Ingush policeman who had taken part in the Beslan attack and was implicated in police killings in Ingushetia. Ingush Deputy Prime Minister Bashir Aushev told the Russian news agency Interfax that Basayev had been sitting in one of several cars near the truck that exploded. His body was identified "through some of the fragments, including his head," Aushev said.

Fragments of Basayev's prosthetic leg were also found, authorities said.

"This is deserved retribution for our children in Beslan, for Budyonnovsk, for all the terrorist attacks that they committed in Moscow and in other regions of the Russian Federation including Ingushetia and the Chechen Republic," said Putin, who had been haunted by the fact that Basayev and his men could move around the region with impunity.

President Bush welcomed the news, saying: "If he's in fact the person who ordered the killing of children in Beslan, he deserved it."

The pro-Kremlin prime minister of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, was elated. Speaking to Russian television, he said, "I promised to kill him. I regret not having being able to do it myself."

Basayev was the second Chechen militant leader killed this summer. Last month, pro-Moscow Chechen commandos killed separatist leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev in a raid in eastern Chechnya. Sadulayev had replaced Aslan Maskhadov, the longtime separatist leader killed in a police raid in March 2005.

The bearded Basayev, frequently photographed in military cap and camouflage uniform, justified his attacks as a response to the Russian army's often savage tactics, shelling villages and killing and imprisoning thousands of civilians.

"Responsibility is with the whole Russian nation, which with silent approval gives a yes," said Basayev, justifying the Beslan siege in an interview aired on ABC television last year. "Well, you can ask why I did it. To stop the killing of thousands and thousands more of Chechen children, Chechen women and the elderly. Look at the facts. They are being kidnapped, taken away, murdered."

A computer salesman during the waning days of the Soviet Union, Basayev's involvement in Chechnya's separatist struggles dates back to 1991, when he helped hijack a Russian plane headed to Turkey to raise money for the separatists. After Russian forces entered Chechnya in 1994, Basayev's exploits grew more brazen. His forces buried a container of radioactive material in a Moscow park in 1995 — a warning of the mayhem they could inflict.

As a field commander, Basayev led a June 1995 raid on the town of Budyonnovsk, in a region bordering Chechnya. He outwitted the Russian military and infiltrated 200 fighters into the town, where they took hundreds of doctors and patients hostage at a hospital. Russian forces stormed the hospital, but their bumbling caused innocent deaths: More than 100 civilians, police and soldiers were killed in the exchange of fire between Chechen fighters and the Russians. Basayev and his followers used some of the hostages as human shields to escape into Chechnya.

The raid brought Basayev fame at home. When Russian troops pulled out in 1996 and Chechnya prepared to elect a president to lead it to de facto independence, Basayev ran for the job.

He lost to rebel commander Maskhadov and became his deputy. Basayev appeared at first to be trying to change from combatant to politician, trimming his flowing beard and trading his camouflage fatigues for a suit.

But much of his activity at the time remains a mystery and there were rumors that he was spotted in Afghanistan as the Taliban were cementing power and al-Qaida was training recruits.

While Maskhadov was regarded by some observers as comparatively moderate, Basayev became an adherent of the strict Wahhabi sect of Islam — the doctrine that inspires al-Qaida leader bin Laden.

By 1999, Basayev, who called himself Abdullah Shamil Abu Idris, was a fighter again. He and a Saudi-born rebel leader known as Khattab seized villages in the Russian region of Dagestan, reportedly to set up an Islamic state.

The raids alarmed the Kremlin and strengthened its resolve to control Chechnya. After some 300 people died in apartment bombings that officials blamed on the rebels — an attack Basayev denied — the military swept back into the republic.

In January 2000, the Russians pounded Chechnya's capital, Grozny, for weeks with bombs and artillery fire, forcing the rebels to flee. Basayev was among the militants who blundered into a minefield, and his foot was blown off.

The injury failed to deter him. In October 2002, Chechen men with automatic rifles and women with explosives strapped to their waists seized about 800 hostages in a Moscow theater in an attack for which he claimed responsibility. Special forces pumped narcotic gas into the theater to knock out the hostage takers — but the gas killed 129 hostages.

Maskhadov then said he was dismissing Basayev as head of the rebels' military committee. Attacks continued.

Twin plane bombings in August 2004 killed 90 people, and an attack near a Moscow subway station killed nine, plus the bomber. Basayev claimed responsibility — and more carnage was to come within days.

In September, some 30 heavily armed militants seized more than 1,000 hostages at School No. 1 in the town of Beslan and held them for three days. The siege ended with explosions and gunfire, killing more than 371 people — half of them children.

Worldwide condemnation of the Beslan attack appeared to undermine support for the Chechen separatists' cause, and Basayev largely laid low thereafter. Last October, he claimed responsibility for organizing an attack on police facilities in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria that left 139 people dead. He apparently did not participate personally in the raids.

Doku Umarov, a successor to Maskhadov as president of the self-declared Chechen rebel government, last month named Basayev as his vice president. It was unclear whether that represented a radicalization of Umarov's faction or whether it was an attempt to rein in Basayev.

The Russians put a $10 million bounty on his head, but to no avail. He mocked them for their failures. "Don't tell me they're trying to find me," he said last year. "I'm trying to find them."

Compiled from The Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Reuters and Baltimore Sun