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Chechen rebel leader shot to death by police

The death of Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev is seen as a key blow to Chechnya's Islamic-inspired insurgency.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 18, 2006

GROZNY, Russia - Special operations police killed the top Chechen rebel leader Saturday after receiving a tip about a terror attack in Chechnya planned to coincide with the upcoming Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev was shot in his hometown of Argun, east of the Chechen capital, Grozny, after he resisted arrest, town police said.

The killing of Sadulayev - rebel leader for about 1 year - deals a blow to the Islamic-inspired insurgency and its efforts to spread beyond Chechnya's borders to attack Russian forces across the poverty-stricken and corruption-gripped south.

An intelligence agent and a police officer also were killed in the operation, according the Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor agency. NTV television reported a rebel trying to flee with Sadulayev was killed, and two rebels escaped. Further details on the raid were not immediately available.

Clad in combat fatigues, Moscow-backed Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov and his lieutenants were shown on NTV standing over a bloodied body identified as Sadulayev's.

Kadyrov said Sadulayev had been planning a terror attack in Argun during the G8 summit of leading industrialized nations in mid July. He said a man from the rebel leader's inner circle had informed authorities on his whereabouts for 1,500 rubels, about $55.

"He urgently needed to buy a dose of heroin, so he sold his leader for heroin," Kadyrov said with a grin. He spoke from his home village, Tsentoroi, in eastern Chechnya, where he had police bring the rebel leader's body. Kadyrov's widely feared paramilitary force is based in the village.

"The terrorists have been virtually beheaded. They have sustained a severe blow, and they are never going to recover from it," Kadyrov said. "We must decisively end international terrorism in the whole of the North Caucasus."

Sadulayev took over after Russian forces killed rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005, but was relatively unknown outside rebel circles.

A field commander, he served as a judge of the Chechen rebels' Shariat committee - an extension of the Islamic court established under Maskhadov when he was Chechnya's elected president in the 1990s.

Chechnya's separatist movement was rooted in nationalist sentiment but in recent years has taken on a growing Islamic cast. Sadulayev, an Islamic fundamentalist, had promoted efforts to spread the rebel movement beyond the Chechen republic.

Russian prosecutors considered him the main organizer of the 2001 kidnapping of Kenneth Gluck of New York, who worked for Doctors Without Borders in southern Russia. Gluck was freed after 25 days, according to a Ekho Moskvy radio report.

The radio station also said Maskhadov had called Sadulayev the co-organizer of a 2004 raid on police and security installations in the Russian republic of Ingushetia, which killed about 90 people.

In announcing the rebel leader's death, the prime minister vowed to quickly track down Shamil Basayev and Doku Umarov, the top warlords in charge of main rebel forces.

Basayev has claimed responsibility for some of Russia's worst terror attacks, including the seizure of some 800 hostages in a Moscow theater in October 2002 and the September 2004 school hostage tragedy in Beslan that killed 331.

[Last modified June 18, 2006, 06:04:31]