"Russian Troops Kill Leader of Chechen Separatists

Source The New York Times
June 18, 2006
by Steven Lee Myers


MOSCOW, June 17 — Russian special forces killed the leader of Chechnya's separatists on Saturday, officials said, reveling in a new blow to a rebel movement with a long history of terrorist attacks that has recently appeared seriously weakened.

The leader, Abdul Khalim Saidullayev, died in a raid in a Chechen village in which two Russian officers were also killed, the director of the Federal Security Service, Nikolai P. Patrushev, said at an international security conference, Russian news agencies reported.

Officials said they would conduct tests to confirm that the body was Mr. Saidullayev's, but they displayed little doubt that they had succeeded in finding and killing the movement's leader. Russian television channels showed gruesome images of a body that appeared to be his, and a Web site linked to the Chechen rebels confirmed his death and declared him a martyr.

"The terrorists have been virtually decapitated," Prime Minister Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya's pro-Moscow government, told the Interfax news agency in the regional capital, Grozny. "They have sustained a severe blow, and they are never going to recover from it."

Mr. Saidullayev, who was believed to be in his 30's, was a little-known fighter, religious figure and Islamic judge when he was appointed in March 2005 to replace Aslan Maskhadov, the rebel leader and elected president of Chechnya during its brief period of independence in the late 1990's. ......

......In remarks posted on a separatist Web site last week, Mr. Saidullayev offered to negotiate peace but vowed to continue struggling for independence, a goal that seems farther away than ever. He said that as long as Russian forces killed women and children in Chechnya, he could not order a halt to attacks like that at Beslan. "Was it not this callous indifference to the killing of our children that made Beslan and things that happened before it possible?" he said, in remarks published in a Bulgarian news weekly, Politika, as transcribed by the BBC. "

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