Translated material
Magas in Moscow
One of the leaders of North Caucasian militants was detained
Yesterday, one of the militant leaders, commander of the armed formations of the self-proclaimed “Caucasian Emirate” Ali Taziev, nicknamed Magas, was detained in the North Caucasus. Over the past six years, the name of Magas has surfaced whenever North Caucasian militants have carried out the most successful acts of sabotage. The intelligence services consider Taziev to be involved in organizing almost all the high-profile terrorist attacks in the region - from the attack on Nazran and the seizure of a school in Beslan in 2004 to the bombing of the Nazran police department and the assassination attempt on the President of Ingushetia Yunus-Bek Yevkurov in the recent past. In recent years, reports of the liquidation of Magas have appeared repeatedly, but none of them have been confirmed. This time, the security forces managed to neutralize the dangerous criminal: yesterday Taziev was taken to Moscow, and almost immediately the Lefortovo District Court of the capital authorized his arrest.FSB head Alexander Bortnikov announced the detention of Ali Taziev on Wednesday at a meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev. According to the head of the FSB, Magas has been on the federal wanted list since 2004, but despite all the active efforts to find him that have been carried out all this time, he was only detained yesterday. Mr. Bortnikov reported to the President that the FSB would be investigating the crimes committed by Taziev (the list exceeds a dozen, and Mr. Bortnikov told the head of state about the most notorious of them). The President, in turn, said: “Everything must be done to correctly document the testimony of this bandit, so that all the necessary procedural actions are completed and subsequently all the crimes that were committed receive an appropriate assessment from the court.” “And this, of course, is a good result of the operation, congratulate on my behalf the employees who took part in it, and make proposals for awards if you think it’s right,” added Mr. Medvedev.
Mr. Bortnikov did not say where one of the militant leaders was detained, but, apparently, the operation took place without the participation of local intelligence officers, and only federal forces took part in it. At least the law enforcement agencies of Chechnya and Ingushetia, namely the republican departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Investigative Committee and the FSB, stated that they had not heard anything about this special operation and only learned about it from the press.
In turn, a source in the special services reported that Ali Taziev was detained in the Ingush Malgobek. Allegedly, he was at one of the addresses that was under surveillance for several days. According to him, Magas could have been captured earlier, more than once, but “the situation did not allow him to be detained alive, as was required by the special services.” The operation was planned in such a way that he did not have time to use weapons. Immediately after the arrest, Magas was taken to the capital.
The FSB Investigation Department charged Taziev with leading a gang underground, organizing and actively participating in an armed rebellion in order to overthrow the constitutional order of Russia, as well as with illegal trafficking in firearms.
From 1998 to 2004, former Ingush police officer Ali Taziev was listed as “died heroically in the line of duty.” Until this time, Russian intelligence services believed that the militant Magomed Evloev was behind the nickname Magas, but in 2004 it turned out that Ali Taziev was hiding under this name. As the Vremya Novostei newspaper has already written, a native of the village of Nasyrkort, Nazran district of Ingushetia, Ali Musaevich Taziev served in the private security department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ingushetia. In 1998, in Nazran, militants planned to kidnap Olga Uspenskaya, the wife of adviser to the President of Ingushetia Valery Fateev. After several unsuccessful kidnapping attempts, Taziev and his partner Dzhandigov were assigned to guard the woman. In October 1998, the car in which Uspenskaya and her guards were was stopped in the center of Nazran by militants: they wounded Dzhandigov, and Taziev, who was driving, put a gun to his head and ordered to go to Grozny. As Mrs. Uspenskaya later said, at first they were all kept in one zindan, but then her guards were taken away somewhere. In 1999, Valery Fateev himself went to Chechnya in search of his wife and was also captured. The couple were released only in 2000. At the same time, the body of Dzhandigov was discovered in Chechnya, who was buried with honors in his homeland. It is logical that Taziev was also considered a hero who died in the line of duty. However, several years later, investigators found out that he joined the militants, where he acquired a passport in the name of Evloev and took the call sign for radio communications “Magas”.
According to the intelligence services, at first Ali Taziev created his own detachment of 30 people, and years later he “rose” first to the leader of the Ingush separatists, and then to the commander of the armed formations of the self-proclaimed “Caucasian Emirate”, the leader of which is Doku Umarov. The intelligence services consider Magas to be involved in organizing all major military operations in recent years against federal forces. According to the investigation, in May 2003, Magas’ militants under his leadership blew up a convoy of federal forces in the Nozhai-Yurt region of Ingushetia, and two months later they broke into the village of Gordali and killed the head of the local administration.
However, Magas became most famous after the attack of several hundred terrorists on Nazran in the summer of 2004. According to the intelligence services, it was he, along with Shamil Basayev, who was killed four years ago, who organized that action. Then the separatists attacked a number of government offices in the city, resulting in 79 people killed and 114 injured.
As the head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, told the president yesterday, Magas was also involved in organizing the explosion of two passenger buses in the Stavropol region, and was involved in the kidnapping of a relative of the former president of Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov.
Among the recent crimes of the militant Taziev, the investigation names the organization of the bombing of the building of the Nazran police department in the summer of 2009, when 25 people were killed and about one and a half hundred were injured, and the organization of the assassination attempt on the President of the Republic Yunus-Bek Yevkurov in June of the same year. Then, let us remind you, as the presidential motorcade passed, an explosive device with a capacity of about 70 kg of TNT went off. As a result of the terrorist attack, the President of Ingushetia received multiple injuries and spent two months in the hospital. In addition, the special services believe that Taziev was also involved in the seizure of the Beslan school on September 1, 2004, when more than 330 people were killed and about 500 were injured.
As the President of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, said yesterday, he hopes that Ali Taziev’s testimony will help him find other leaders of the bandit underground and those residents and officials who helped him hide. Mr. Yevkurov called on the officials with whom Taziev had previously spent the night to “come and confess to the law enforcement agencies before the law enforcement agencies come to them.” The head of the republic also confirmed that Magas took part in the assassination attempt on him last summer.