Informers paid $13.5m to flush out Chechen rebel

MOSCOW - Russia's FSB security service has revealed its secret weapon in its struggle against armed Chechen separatists: US$10 million (13.5 million).

That at least is the amount the FSB claims to have paid informants who allegedly disclosed the hiding place of rebel Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov last week.

The FSB caught up with Maskhadov, who had been on the run for five years, in a tiny village in northern Chechnya.

Maskhadov, 53, the figurehead of armed Chechen separatist resistance, did not survive the encounter, though the precise circumstances of his death are shrouded in mystery.

The FSB, which has previously offered to arrange for informers to undergo plastic surgery, said yesterday it had offered the loquacious new millionaires who betrayed him relocation to another part of Russia or even to a Muslim country.

It promised a further US$10 million to anyone who could shed light on the whereabouts of Russia's most wanted man, Shamil Basayev, who claimed responsibility for last September's Beslan school siege.

In a country where the average monthly wage outside Moscow is as low as US$200, US$10 million is a fairytale amount.

Alu Alkhanov, the Moscow-backed president of Chechnya and a man seen by rebels as a Kremlin stooge, claimed cash rewards would speed up the "neutralisation" of separatist rebels still at large.

"I'm meeting the news [of the bounty] with great satisfaction. No one will have doubts now that information about guerrilla leaders is always paid up," he was quoted by Interfax as saying.

The official version of events which is that Maskhadov died accidentally in a grenade blast designed to destroy the bunker wall behind which he was cowering.

Suspicion has been fuelled by the fact that the authorities have refused to hand over his body to relatives. Under Russian law people deemed to be "terrorists" as Maskhadov was, are buried secretly. The fact that Russian forces blew up the house beneath which he was apparently hiding as well as the bunker itself, purportedly to clear booby traps, has also not helped to convince sceptics.

Yakha Yusupova, who lived in the house with her family, has denied that Maskhadov was hiding there and suggested his lifeless corpse was brought there specially by Russian forces to stage a "sham" operation.

The Moskovsky Komsomolets daily has published the results of an investigation which it says prove Maskhadov gave himself up in a special deal only to be interrogated and executed.

- INDEPENDENT