Adding to his reputation as the "Most Wanted Man in Russia," Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev is now the most hunted man in Chechnya.
Yesterday, the head of the security police in Chechnya's new pro-Russian government went on television and announced a "group of Chechen businessmen" has offered a US $5-million bounty for any information that helps "neutralize" Mr. Basayev.
Ramadan Kadyrov, son of Chechnya's recently elected President, Akhmad Kadyrov, and head of his father's security service, claimed Mr. Basayev is the only remaining Chechen leader fighting Russian troops in the bloodstained republic.
"So we want to liquidate him, pure and simple, to end this grinding war," Mr. Kadyrov said.
Like U.S. officials in Iraq who have been trying to hunt down Saddam Hussein for the past eight months, Russia and its proxy government in Chechnya are hoping human greed will give them the results their own armed might hasn't.
Mr. Basayev, a balding 38-year-old with a bushy beard, is both a terrorist mastermind and one of the most successful Chechen guerrilla leaders in a decade-old ethnic rebellion that has convulsed both Chechnya and Russia.
Despite losing a leg to a Russian land mine during vicious streetfighting in Grozny three years ago, Mr. Basayev has continued to marshal a band of Islamic guerrillas and Chechen nationalists from bases in the Caucasus mountains.
He has claimed credit for planning the Chechen rebel raid on Moscow's Dubrovka Theatre in October, 2002, which left 129 dead. And he has vowed "to take Chechnya's war on to Russian territory," attacking Russians inside Russia with a wave of suicide bombings.
To back up that claim, Mr. Basayev recently bragged he personally detonated the explosives on suicide bombers who destroyed an administrative headquarters complex in Grozny last December, killing 78 people.
Most recently, he has threatened to disrupt Russia's parliamentary elections, scheduled to be held on Dec. 7.
Russian security officials are taking the threat seriously and have beefed up security around Moscow, fearing another of Mr. Basayev's sensational attacks.
Those fears may be justified, since the Chechen commander has linked his guerrilla group with a band of Wahhabist fundamentalist Arabs who have direct links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Last August, the U.S. State Department declared Mr. Basayev and his Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs a terrorist group and moved to freeze any assets he or the group might have in the United States.
Like his ancestors, who waged an ultimately unsuccessful 20-year war against the Czar's imperial Russian army in the mid-19th century, Mr. Basayev believes he, too, is waging a religious war to defend Islam in the Caucasus.
Mr. Basayev plunged into a life of violent confrontation in 1991, when the former Soviet Union began to disintegrate.
In August, 1991, when communists attempted a coup in Moscow, Mr. Basayev rallied to support former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, rushing to the barricades armed with hand grenades.
Three months later, when a new local government led by former Soviet air force General Dzhokhar Dudayev declared Chechen independence, he returned home and staged a spectacular airplane hijack in support of the Chechen independence movement.
He and a small band of companions forced a Russian airliner to fly to Ankara, where he demanded a news conference to highlight Chechnya's plight, warning the Russian army was poised to crush the tiny state.
The hijacking ended without incident and Turkish officials let Mr. Basayev escape.
While the affair established Mr. Basayev's reputation as a daring and dangerous leader, it accomplished little. The Russian parliament refused to ratify Mr. Yeltsin's invasion plans and the first Russian invasion of Chechnya was put off until 1994.
When Russian troops did finally move to crush the rebellion, the result was two years of war, tens of thousands dead and much of Grozny in ruin. Mr. Basayev became known as Chechnya's top guerrilla field commander, frequently defeating Russian troops in savage street battles in Grozny. He also developed a reputation for elusiveness, as the Russians proudly but erroneously reported they had killed him at least three times.
In 1995, Mr. Basayev won further notoriety when he and a band of 150 guerrillas crossed into Russia and seized 1,500 hostages in the village of Budyonnovsk.
Keeping his captives in a local hospital, Mr. Basayev held the Russians to a bloody standoff that cost the lives of more than 100 people. But in the end, he negotiated his group's escape aboard six buses and even used a refrigerated truck to carry home the bodies of his dead comrades.
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