Police Kill Leader Of Chechen Rebels

Premier Calls Death a 'Severe Blow'

GROZNY, Russia, June 17 -- Police killed the top Chechen rebel leader in a special operation in his home town Saturday.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev was shot in the town of Argun, east of the Chechen capital, Grozny, after he resisted arrest, police said.

An intelligence agent and a police officer also were killed in the operation, according the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the KGB. NTV television in Russia reported that a rebel trying to flee with Sadulayev was killed and that two rebels escaped. Further details about the raid were not immediately available.

Sadulayev took over after Russian forces killed rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005. He was relatively unknown outside rebel circles.

Sadulayev, a field commander, served as a judge on the Chechen rebels' court of Islamic law.

Chechnya's separatist movement is rooted in nationalist sentiment but in recent years has taken on a growing Islamic cast. Sadulayev, an Islamic fundamentalist, had promoted efforts to spread the rebel movement beyond the Chechen republic.

The Moscow-backed Chechen prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, and his lieutenants were shown on NTV standing over a bloodied body identified as Sadulayev's.

The prime minister said Sadulayev had been planning an attack in Argun to coincide with the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg in mid-July. Kadyrov said that for about $55, a man from the rebel leader's inner circle had informed authorities of Sadulayev's whereabouts.

"He urgently needed to buy a dose of heroin, so he sold his leader for heroin," Kadyrov said. He spoke from his home village, Tsentoroi, in eastern Chechnya, where he had police bring the rebel leader's body. Kadyrov's widely feared paramilitary force is based in the village.

"The terrorists have been virtually beheaded. They have sustained a severe blow, and they are never going to recover from it," Kadyrov said. "We must decisively end international terrorism in the whole of the North Caucasus."

Russian prosecutors considered Sadulayev the main organizer of the 2001 kidnapping of Kenneth Gluck of New York, who worked for Doctors Without Borders in southern Russia. Gluck was freed after 25 days, according to an Echo Moskvy radio report.

The radio station also said Maskhadov had called Sadulayev one of the organizers of a 2004 raid on police and security installations that killed about 90 people in the Russian republic of Ingushetia.

In announcing the rebel leader's death, the prime minister vowed to quickly track down Shamil Basayev and Doku Umarov, the top warlords in charge of main rebel forces.

Basayev has asserted responsibility for some of Russia's deadliest terrorist attacks, including the seizure of more than 800 hostages in a Moscow theater in October 2002 and the September 2004 school hostage situation in Beslan that killed 331.