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Russia Captures Two Chechen Leaders
MOSCOW, March 11 (News Agencies) - Russia secured a major propaganda coup in its campaign against Chechen separatists Sunday with the arrest of two leading separatists in Azerbaijan and in the process improving cooperation with its southern Caucasus neighbor.
The office of the Kremlin's spokesman for Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, said Chechen leader Ruslan Akhmadov and an associate of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, Badrudi Murtazayev, had been brought to Russia but said "no details will be given in the interests of the investigation."
Akhmadov is believed to have been behind the gruesome beheading of four western hostages, three Britons and a New Zealander, in 1998.
Officials in Azerbaijan said the two leaders, who had been carrying forged papers, were arrested in Baku on Wednesday.
An Azerbaijani interior ministry spokesman said the men were handed over to the Russian authorities on Saturday in line with extradition agreements between Moscow and Baku.
Russian colleagues tipped off Azerbaijani police as to their whereabouts, deputy Azerbaijani interior minister Orudzh Zalov said, quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.
Yastrzhembsky hailed the arrest and extradition as an example of improved cooperation between the two countries' security forces.
"If certain others of Russia's neighbors were to follow Baku's example, the tension in Chechnya could be extinguished a lot more quickly," he said in a clear reference to Georgia, accused by Moscow of allowing Chechen separatists to use it as a transit route for men and material.
Baku has previously also ignored Moscow's accusations of providing a haven for Chechen separatist activities.
Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev, in an interview on Russian television, explained that over the past five years some 300 Azeris had been arrested in Russia and returned to Azerbaijan where police sought them, and that Baku was returning the favor.
Russian television showed newsreel footage of the two men shortly after their arrival at an unidentified location on Russian territory.
A trembling Murtazayev admitted in front of the cameras that he had held a Russian soldier down while another separatist shot him dead.
The news report was accompanied by a video sequence purportedly presenting the preliminaries to the execution, said to have been recorded by the Chchens themselves for propaganda purposes.
Akhmadov appeared more self-confident, telling the camera that four of his brothers had been killed but that a fifth was continuing to fight.
Wanted for alleged involvement in several murders, armed robberies and kidnappings, Akhmadov is one of six brothers who head a group, led by Uvayis Akhmadov, which specializes in kidnapping civilians for ransom.
Russian prosecutors hold the two leaders responsible for at least 25 kidnappings, including those of two Polish women scientists seized in the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan in 1999.
Judicial officials quoted by ITAR-TASS said Akhmadov had already been charged with abducting the two Polish women and with holding forged documents.
Murtazayev has been linked with Basayev who with his lieutenant Khattab, is regarded by Moscow as the most active of the Chechen separtists fighting Russian troops.
Moscow sent its forces into Chechnya on October 1, 1999 to put down a separatist rebellion.
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