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Chechen rebel leader killed in Russian assault

Death of former president Aslan Maskhadov ends hope of a negotiated settlement to end the 10-year conflict with Russia

Aslan Maskhadov, the leader of the Chechen separatist movement, was killed yesterday during a raid by Russian special forces.

General Major Ilya Shabalkin, spokesman for the Russian forces in the North Caucuses, told the Guardian Mr Maskhadov died when troops from the elite Alfa and Vimpel units of the Russian security services, the FSB, tried to arrest him in the Chechen village of Tolstoy Yurt, but that he had been killed, apparently by accident, in an explosion.

The death of the former Chechen president and the more moderate of the separatists still carrying out attacks on Russian troops will quash what dim hopes remained for a negotiated settlement of the 10-year conflict, in which Mr Maskhadov, 53, was the only player prepared to negotiate.

In a well co-ordinated media operation his corpse was shown on the Russian TV channel NTV laying in a pool of blood in the courtyard of the house in whose basement he had been hiding. A masked soldier pulled from the wreckage a plastic bag containing the flag Chechnya used during its independence under Mr Maskhadov from 1996 to 1999.

Mr Mashkadov's corpse was dressed in a blue tracksuit pulled up to reveal his stomach. His right eye was swollen with bruising and he had a puncture wound in his head.

The chief of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, told President Vladimir Putin his men sustained no losses during the operation and that investigators were examining the body.

Akhmed Zakayev, Mr Maskhadov's spokesman who has political asylum in London, told the Guardian by telephone: "I can confirm his death. I have spoken to people there [in Chechnya]. He was killed in a fight, a shootout. He was without his security, practically alone. The Russians would know themselves he would never be taken alive."

The Kremlin will seize on the death as a significant political victory for Mr Putin's hardline policy on Chechnya, coming at a time when domestic reforms have plunged the Kremlin head's ratings to an all-time low.

Mr Putin said: "There's still a lot of work to do there. We have to build up our forces to protect the people of the republic and citizens of all Russia from the bandits." He told Mr Patrushev to investigate further to "confirm" the information.

Mr Shabalkin said: "We received information that there was an international terrorist [in Tolstoy Yurt] and undertook a special operation to arrest him." He said troops had to detonate an explosive to gain access to the bunker, in which Mr Maskhadov and three accomplices had barricaded themselves. Mr Shabalkin said Mr Maskhadov was probably killed as he was too close to the blast.

However, Ramzan Kadyrov, the influential son of the late pro-Russian president of Chechnya, Akhmed Kadyrov, said the separatist had been killed by a careless shot fired by his bodyguards. Mr Kadyrov told Interfax the death was a "gift" to all Chechen women on the public holiday of International Women's Day yesterday.

Mr Shabalkin added that Mr Maskhadov had been officially identified using witnesses and photographs and doubted the three accomplices arrested during the operation had information that could assist them in killing the Chechen separatist militant, Shamil Basayev, Russia's most wanted man.

Mr Zakayev said: "He was caught absolutely accidentally. The village is small and he did not have his usual security detail so as not to attract attention." He said a Chechen separatist committee would soon meet and appoint Mr Maskhadov's successor, declining to name any candidates.

"For the resistance it is a loss, but another will take his place. Russian propaganda has for hundreds of years tried to say that the problem is not with the Chechen people but with one of their leaders.

"Maskhadov was a young and promising Soviet commander who headed our forces at the start." He added: "All the peaceful initiatives in past years had come from Maskhadov's side".

He said the "political killing of our president will increase the position of the radical side," namely Mr Basayev.

Life of conflict

· Aslan Maskhadov was born in Kazakhstan in 1951, his family having been deported from Chechnya by the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, along with the rest of the Chechen people, in 1944.

· Maskhadov became a Soviet artillery colonel. Later he led his breakaway region's forces in a 21-month war which ended in 1996 with a humiliating defeat of the Russian troops.

· Maskhadov won a landslide presidential election victory in January 1997. In May, he and President Boris Yeltsin signed a peace accord but Chechnya's final status was left unresolved. Moscow said Chechnya must remain a part of the Russian Federation, albeit with wide autonomy.

· In 1999 Vladimir Putin, then the prime minister of Russia, blamed Chechen rebels for a series of bombings in Russian cities. Troops were sent back to Chechnya and the separatist leaders fled. Maskhadov had been in hiding since the Russian troops retook the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 2000.

· Last month Maskhadov was said to have ordered a ceasefire by his forces as a gesture of goodwill aimed at ending the conflict. Leaders of Chechnya's pro-Moscow government rejected the offer, calling it a cynical ploy to allow the rebels to regroup.

· Moscow blamed Maskhadov, who had a $10m reward on his head, for a string of deadly operations in Russia. These included the occupation of a Moscow theatre, a bombing near the Kremlin and last year's hostage-taking at a school in Beslan, in which at least 326 hostages died, half of them children.

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