ONE of the most senior rebel leaders in the war-torn Russian republic of Chechnya was killed yesterday in the latest blow to Islamic insurgents fighting Moscow.
Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev was shot dead in Argun, a town 20 miles east of the bombed-out capital Grozny, by Chechen special forces loyal to the Kremlin.

In characteristically bloodsoaked style, Ramzan Kadyrov, the prime minister, announced that he would put the body on display as soon as possible.

“The terrorists have been virtually beheaded,” said Kadyrov, whose father Akhmad, the former pro-Moscow Chechen president, was blown up by rebels two years ago. “They have sustained a severe blow, and they are never going to recover from it.”

Sadulayev, a mullah who turned to arms, had served as a judge on the Chechen rebels’ sharia committee — an extension of the Islamic court established under Maskhadov when he was Chechnya’s elected president in the late 1990s.

Under Sadulayev’s leadership, attacks by his rebel fighters have spread beyond Chechnya’s borders to the rest of the North Caucasus in close collaboration with his ally Shamil Basayev, Russia’s most wanted terrorist and the mastermind of the Moscow theatre and Beslan school sieges in which a total of almost 500 people died.

Hostage-taking raids and a string of suicide bombings spread in recent months to the neighbouring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia.

Last week Ingushetia’s special forces chief was gunned down with his three young children, a brother and a guard. Rebels have also killed the deputy interior minister, kidnapped the president’s father-in-law and attempted to kill the health minister.