April 26, 2002	Friday	Safar 12, 1423

MOSCOW, April 25: Russia claimed on Thursday its troops had killed one of the country’s most wanted and reviled men, Khattab, an Arab-born Chechen guerilla leader with alleged links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

“The international terrorist Khattab, an ideologist and organizer of terrorist activity, has been eliminated as a result of a special operation by the federal security service in the Chechen republic,” a spokesman for the service said.

The Service, or FSB, produced no body or other evidence of Khattab’s demise but the spokesman said the domestic intelligence service would furnish proof later.

Khattab’s death would be a coup for Moscow after over two years of failed efforts to kill or capture any leading warlord in Chechnya.

“If he really has been killed then it is a strike against terrorism,” President Vladimir Putin said in a guarded first reaction to the report.

But utin said Khattab’s death of itself would not end strife in the republic. The Chechnya campaign would only achieve its goals if military successes were followed up by political and social measures, he said.

SCANT DETAILS: Interfax quoted an unnamed FSB officer as saying the raid in which Khattab died took place last month. The officer, who the news agency said took part in the operation, said Khattab had not been heard since in radio exchanges in Chechnya.

Ekho Moskvy radio quoted a sister television company as saying military sources told it Khattab’s beheaded body had lain in a morgue in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don for a long time while forensic experts struggled to identify it.

But Mairbek Vachagayev, an envoy for Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, suggested the report might be a ruse.

“The federal security service is at a loss as to where he may be and is trying to trick him out into the open,” Vachagayev told Ekho Moskvy.

Reports of Khattab’s death — and that of another Chechen warlord topping Russia’s “most-wanted” list, Shamil Basayev — have surfaced repeatedly but proven false.

Moscow sent troops into Chechnya in Oct 1999 for a second time to restore its rule.—Reuters