Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.
Adam Deniyev finally got his 15 minutes of worldwide fame by being perhaps the first man to be blown up while recording a TV show.
The deputy leader of the pro-Kremlin Chechen administration, he was widely held to be
responsible for a wave of kidnappings in Chechnya, the murder of six Red Cross nurses in 1996 and the curious abduction of the Russian journalist Andrei Babitsky last year.
Some Chechens might even nominate Deniyev's death as their favourite TV moment.
His killing on Friday morning (NZT), disclosed yesterday by the Kremlin, took place while he was being filmed reciting from the Koran on the roof of the TV station in Avtury in the south of the war-shattered country. It is further evidence that the Chechen guerrilla war is not over, despite repeated assertions by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
Adam Khozhayevich Deniyev changed his first name to Shamalu to build up his image as a man of Islam. His claim to be a good Muslim did not sit well with his entourage of machine-gun toting bodyguards, his hand in organized crime and his good connections with the not very Islamic regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But he was, first and foremost, the Kremlin's Chech-en, very close to the Russian secret police, the FSB the new branding of the old KGB.
His death is a big blow to the Kremlin's hopes that the Chechen "terrorists" were finished. The dirty war continues, with a steady, slow, demoralising killing of Russian soldiers and Kremlin placemen in the mainly Islamic republic in the southern Caucuses. Many Chechens, unsympathetic to Islamic extremism, will not forgive Putin his brutal attack on Grozny.
The strongest evidence against Deniyev came from the Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitsky, whose reporting of the war disgusted Mr Putin, a former KGB chief.
Babitsky "disappeared" for six weeks in Chechnya. He blamed his captivity on "an extremely poorly planned action of the FSB" and said the masked men to whom he was handed over by federal forces in a bizarre filmed exchange were loyal to Deniyev. He described him as having "ties to the secret services".
Deniyev is also accused by the Chechen government- in-exile as the man responsible for the six Red Cross nurses killed in their beds in December, 1996 in the worst single atrocity in the charity's history.
The evidence against Deniyev is not substantial, but he was also said to be involved in racketeering, extortion and a blood feud that had cost the lives of at least three men and perhaps many more.
One of the nurses killed in the 1996 atrocity, Fernanda Calado, was Spanish and used to cheer up aid workers in the worst places on earth with her Flamenco dancing. It is unlikely that Deniyev will be mourned in quite the same way as his suspected victims.
- INDEPENDENT
Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.
Adam Deniyev finally got his 15 minutes of worldwide fame by being perhaps the first man to be blown up while recording a TV show.
The deputy leader of the pro-Kremlin Chechen administration, he was widely held to be
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