Shamil Basayev killed

On July 10, 2006 FSB director Nikolai Patrushev claimed that Shamil Basayev was assassinated in a "special operation". Patrushev was shown on Russian television briefing Putin on the killing of Basayev.

The most wanted Chechen rebel warlord has died in an explosion in the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia. The FSB chief said Basayev was among a group of militants killed as they prepared to carry out a "terrorist act" in Ingushetia, which borders on Chechnya.

"This was made possible because of our operations abroad, primarily in countries where weapons were obtained and then sent on to Russia, where the terrorism was carried out," he told Mr Putin.

The Russian president said "this is the revenge the bandits deserve for our children in Beslan, for Budyonnovsk, for all the acts of terrorism they have committed in Moscow and in other regions of the Russian Federation, including Ingushetia and the Chechen Republic". He announced awards for the Russian special forces involved.

Earlier the same day, Russian media reported that a lorry packed with explosives had blown up during a "special operation" against militants. Four militants were reported killed in the incident.

But a pro-rebel website said Basayev and three other militants died when a lorry carrying explosives blew up accidentally.

"Basayev's body has been identified through some of the fragments, including his head," Ingush Deputy Prime Minister Bashir Aushev told the Interfax news service. Up to ten Chechen terrorists may have been killed during the attack.

Basayev's role in defining insurgent tactics

The tactics and methods used by terrorists in Russia were largely masterminded by Shamil Basayev. Despite his undisputed skills in guerrilla warfare, his first love was hostage taking.

When in November 1991 Chechen nationalist president Dzhokhar Dudaev unilaterally declared independence, Boris Yeltsin announced a state of emergency and dispatched troops to the border of Chechnya. In response Basayev, then 26 years old, and two friends hijacked a plane that had left Mineralnyye Vody in Russia, diverted it to Ankara, and threatened to blow up the aircraft unless the state of emergency was lifted. The hijacking was resolved peacefully in Turkey, and Basayev was allowed to return safely to Chechnya.

His mark was on many of the biggest attacks that followed over the next fifteen years. The most spectacular actions carried out by terrorists on Russian soil were not suicide bombings but hostage takings: the hospital in Budennovsk in 1995, the village of Pervomayskoye in 1996, the Moscow theater in 2002, and the Beslan school in 2004, all organized by Chechens and led by Basayev.

In the early 2000s Chechen terrorists used suicide bombers, but their method was different from Al Qaeda’s: In Russia, female suicide bombers were primarily used, and would-be “martyrs”were never trained or used in pairs, as was common practice for Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan. The use of female shahidas (“black widows”) appears to have been Basayev’s tactic, predating the use of women as suicide bombers in Palestine.*

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* The first attack carried out by female suicide bombers in Chechnya took place on June 7, 2000, when Khava Barayeva and Luiza Magomadova blew themselves up in a truck near the military base in the village of Alkhan-Yourt. Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian female suicide bomber, detonated a bomb in Jerusalem on January 27, 2002.

Agentura.Ru March 2011