| The kidnapper of General Shpigun was met on a country road The leadership of the Chechen separatists suffered another heavy loss yesterday. As representatives of the Russian special services announced, on Tuesday in Ingushetia, as a result of a special operation by the Russian FSB, Brigadier General, former “commander of the Urus-Martan Front of Ichkeria,” 41-year-old Akhmed Basnukaev, was killed. Let us recall that at the beginning of this week the authorities confirmed the fact of the destruction of another, even more prominent field commander in Dagestan - Ruslan Gelayev.
According to intelligence services, Basnukaev was one of the organizers of the kidnapping of General of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Gennady Shpigun in Grozny in 1999 and the terrorist attacks committed in 2002-2003 in Kaspiysk, Essentuki and Moscow. Counterintelligence officers had been hunting for him for a long time, but only at the end of last week they received a more or less reliable “tip.” They learned that Basnukaev and his guard would travel by car from Ingushetia to Chechnya, and an ambush was set up in the Nazran region near the border of the two republics on an unguarded country road. Basnukaev was driving an inconspicuous Zhiguli. When the squad asked the driver to stop, he tried to break through. In the ensuing firefight, both the field commander and his guard were killed. In the trunk of the Zhiguli, investigators found 8 kg of plastic, ammunition and weapons.
According to the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs, law enforcement agencies first became interested in Akhmed Basnukaev back in 1991. At that time, he and his relatives organized a gang that engaged in robbery and robberies in the Urus-Martan and Achkhoy-Martan regions. But then it was not possible to catch him. Soon after the outbreak of hostilities in Chechnya, Dudayev appointed Basnukaev “commander of the Urus-Martan Front.” In battles with federal forces, he was seriously wounded, and for his services to Ichkeria in 1996, Maskhadov awarded him the rank of brigadier general, and in 1997 allocated 30 million rubles from the budget of Chechnya. to send a “hero” for treatment abroad. According to the intelligence services, upon his return in March 1999, he took part in developing a plan to kidnap the representative of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs in Chechnya, General Gennady Shpigun, directly from an airplane at the Grozny airport. When the second Chechen campaign began, in October 1999, Basnukaev organized the defense of Grozny, and in November he “became famous” for leading a group of journalists into the besieged city, among whom was Radio Liberty correspondent Andrei Babitsky.
Yesterday, Mr. Babitsky himself, now working in Prague, told our correspondent that “Basnukaev was not as cruel as the Russian special services are now trying to portray him, he generally opposed Wahhabism.” However, according to intelligence services, in March 2000, Basnukaev and Ruslan Gelayev’s detachment participated in the capture of the village of Komsomolskoye, and then again hid with him in the Pankisi Gorge of Georgia. “Until Basnukaev quarreled with Gelayev, he was always in Pankisi and did not take part in the hostilities,” said Mr. Babitsky. - According to my information, in recent years he had a falling out with Maskhadov and Basayev and did not have any money to participate in hostilities. He simply wandered, like all of them (militants - Ed. ) between Chechnya and Ingushetia." According to the FSB, Basnukaev took part in the preparation of the terrorist attack on May 9, 2002 in the Dagestan city of Kaspiysk, which killed more than 50 people, and on electric trains in Essentuki in September and December 2003. Then 60 people died. Alexander RASKIN |
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