Police kill Chechen insurgent leader

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, June 17, 2006

GROZNY, Russia – Police killed the Chechen rebel leader Saturday, allegedly acting on a tip from within his network, delivering a possible blow to efforts to spread the increasingly Islam-inspired insurgency throughout southern Russia.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev was shot during a raid on a hideout in his Chechen hometown of Argun, nine miles east of Grozny. He had been planning a terror attack in Argun to coincide with the Group of Eight summit of leading industrialized nations in St. Petersburg in mid-July, the Moscow-backed Chechen premier said.

Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov posed for TV cameras next to a half-naked bloodied body identified as the rebel leader’s. He said a close associate of Sadulayev’s tipped police to his whereabouts for the equivalent of $55.

“He urgently needed to buy a dose of heroin, so he sold his leader for heroin,” Kadyrov, flanked by his lieutenants, said with a grin.

The prime minister said his paramilitary police had wanted to capture Sadulayev but had to kill him when he resisted arrest. Russian television stations showed the basement of a house where the rebel leader was allegedly hiding, its wall riddled with bullets.

“The terrorists have been virtually beheaded. They have sustained a severe blow, and they are never going to recover from it,” Kadyrov said.

An Islamic scholar, Sadulayev took over after Russian forces killed rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005. Maskhadov had called Sadulayev a co-organizer of a high-profile Chechen rebel attack: a 2004 raid on police and security installations in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia that killed about 90 people.

Top rebel aide Ibrahim Mezhidov confirmed that Sadulayev was killed, according to the Kavkaz Center Web site, which is sympathetic to rebels in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

Speaking to Ekho Moskvy radio, rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev, who lives in London, denounced the killing as a “political murder.” He said warlord Doku Umarov would now become secessionist president.