The mastermind

Shamil Salmanovitch Basayev was born in 1965 in Vedeno in the Caucasus and remained true to the family tradition - after the 1918 October revolution his grandfather had fought for an independent Caucasian emirate. After military service his grandson worked in the Soviet armed forces, where he was reputedly trained for special sabotage missions on a collective farm near Volgograd. Since he was not admitted to study law, he began a civil engineering course in 1987, but a year later he had to discontinue his studies because of poor results.

In August 1991 during the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, Basayev, carrying a weapon in his hand, was still on the side of Boris Yeltsin, a Moscow defender of the White House. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became a Chechen separatist. He received his terrorist training in Pakistan and subsequently in Afghanistan. He lost to Dzhokhar Dudayev in the Presidential election of 1991, and in November of the same year he hijacked a Soviet passenger aircraft in Turkey and fought against Georgia in the Abkhazian struggle for independence. He was blamed for the murder of thousands of Georgian civilians.

In the first Chechen war he became a hero of the struggle for freedom, along with Aslan Maskhadov. He lost to Maskhadov in the presidential election of 1997. Basayev lost his lower leg in 2000 while fleeing from besieged Grozny. He was a Wahabi, a follower of the most militant form of Islam, and had two wives. For a short time he attempted to establish an independent Islamic theocracy in neighbouring Dagestan. Basayev was killed in an explosion on 10 July 2006 during a 'special operation' by Russian security forces.