Russia's Elusive Top Terrorist

He is Russia's homegrown version of Osama bin Laden, a shadowy terrorist who allegedly organized the Beslan school siege along with a recent subway bombing and suicide attacks that downed two planes. Like bin Laden, he is an elusive target who has evaded capture for years.

Shamil Basayev has been helped by the vast sympathy he enjoys from many Chechens, a people who have resisted Russian domination for centuries and are furious over widespread human rights abuses by Russian troops in the Caucasus republic, experts say.

Basayev, a top leader of the long and bloody Chechen separatist rebellion, also has benefited from incompetence in the Russian intelligence agencies and military, who have repeatedly failed to prevent terror attacks.

The 39-year-old Basayev has been increasingly influenced by Arabs tied to al Qaeda and he is believed to have the adopted harsher Muslim beliefs of the conservative Wahhabi strain of Islam.

A letter attributed to Basayev and posted Friday on a Web site affiliated with Chechen rebels, claimed responsibility for the latest terror attacks. There was no way to confirm the note's authenticity. Basayev alleged Russian forces had provoked the bloody end to the school siege by storming the building. More than 330 people died - nearly half of them children.

"We regret what happened in Beslan. It's simply that the war, which (Russian President Vladimir) Putin declared on us five years ago, which has destroyed more than 40,000 Chechen children and crippled more than 5,000 of them, has gone back to where it started from," he wrote in the letter.

Basayev, born in the mountain village of Vedeno in southern Chechnya, is believed to have been deeply affected by the May 1995 Russian bombing of Vedeno, in which several of his family members were killed.

One of Basayev's most infamous attacks took place the following month, when he led some 200 fighters in a siege of a hospital in southern Russia and took hundreds of hostages. Russian forces stormed the building, and more than 100 civilians died. Basayev and his men escaped.

Basayev has claimed a series of terror attacks since the second Chechen war started in 1999, including the May bombing in the Chechen capital Grozny that killed Kremlin-backed regional president Akhmad Kadyrov. He also said he helped orchestrate the October 2002 siege at a Moscow theater where some 800 people were taken hostage. At least 129 hostages died, mostly from effects of a narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.

After the latest attacks, Russia's Federal Security Service offered a reward of $10 million for information that could help "neutralize" Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov, another rebel leader.

Chechnya's Deputy Interior Minister Sultan Satuyev told the Interfax news agency on Sunday that a search operation involving 1,000 personnel was underway in Chechnya's mountains after intelligence reports suggested that Basayev was in the republic. Forces were also searching for Chechnya's rebel President Aslan Maskhadov, Satuyev said.

Russian forces have in the past claimed to have reliable tips on Basayev's location, but failed to catch him. The loss of his leg in 1999 while fleeing Russian forces through a minefield has not hindered him.

The main challenge in capturing him is widespread sympathy among the Chechen people, said independent Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer.

"When (security forces) move they are reported immediately," he said, adding that women and children are part of the network of informers who long ago identified the undercover vehicles used by Russian agents.

Sergei Markov, an analyst with close ties to the Kremlin, lamented that the post-Soviet shake-up in Russia has reduced the formerly omnipotent KGB to a shadow of its former self, robbing the intelligence agency of the ability to infiltrate militant circles.

"In these conditions, the revival of the main instrument in the war on terrorism - a network of agents - is proceeding with great difficulty," he said. "How do you find agents among various ethnic groups? They have known each other since childhood, from the clans and the courtyards."

Russian intelligence agencies have repeatedly shown ineptitude, said Anatol Lieven, a senior associate at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power."

"If you want to know why (Russian authorities) haven't captured Basayev yet, you only have to look at the incompetence with which they handled the siege at (the Moscow theater) and Beslan," he said.

Intelligence failures have typified the Chechen wars, where thousands of Russian soldiers have lost their lives.

"There's no mystery about this, the whole Russian state is in shambles," he said.

Lieven said Basayev may be hiding in Georgia, which shares a mountainous border with Chechnya. Russian authorities have repeatedly accused Tbilisi of allowing rebels to find shelter.

Liberal Russian political figures have claimed the Russian government itself lacks the will to capture Basayev, keeping him around as a useful foil to justify continued fighting in Chechnya.

But Lieven dismissed such talk as unfounded and said such rumors were similar to those suggesting President Bush's administration was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"You can oppose these conflicts without yielding to irrational conspiracy theories," he said.

Echoing U.S. authorities who play down the fact that bin Laden remains at-large more than three years after the attacks on New York and Washington, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sought Friday to diminish the significance of what Basayev's capture would mean in stopping future terror attacks in Russia. He alleged international terrorism would still be the driving force behind the violence.

"The fact that he took full responsibility of course does not mean that by liquidating the problem that exists in connection with Basayev, all the rest will disappear," Lavrov said.