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MOSCOW - The James Bond-like plot apparently used by the Kremlin to kill its most dangerous enemy - Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev - was laid bare by a Russian newspaper yesterday, angering the dead terrorist's supporters.
The 41 year-old rebel, known as "The Butcher of Beslan" because of
his role in masterminding the siege of a school in the Russian city in 2004, was killed last July in what the FSB security service boasted was a sophisticated "special operation".
He died with at least three accomplices when a truck carrying an arms shipment for the rebels blew up.
The explosion was apparently so powerful, however, that the Kremlin has struggled to supply cast-iron proof that Basayev is really dead to this day and the circumstances of his demise remain murky.
His supporters claim that he died in an explosives accident while others, including the murdered reporter Anna Politkovskaya, have suggested that he may not be dead at all but had struck a deal with the FSB to disappear and change his identity.
However, what looked like official photographs of the special operation that culminated in his death have appeared in the daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets alongside a detailed account of the sting.
The report looked like a deliberate leak from the FSB and spoke in glowing terms of the KGB successor organisation's prowess.
It an article that read like a script from a James Bond film, it talked of a decoy lorry, of female FSB agents posing as waitresses, of doctored food and drink, and of a truck stuffed with enough guns and explosives to start a small war.
According to the newspaper, an FSB agent infiltrated Basayev's entourage in an elaborate sting. The two drivers delivering the arms shipment to Basayev were drugged and the truck that was carrying the consignment mined.
Two female FSB agents posing as waitresses apparently sprinkled a powerful sedative on the drivers' food or drink, putting them to sleep for four hours.
In that time a team of FSB agents allegedly unloaded the stash of arms, photographed and inventoried it, and then painstakingly replaced it and mined the truck.
"They followed him, outwitted him and blew him up," the newspaper wrote, calling the arms shipment, which was pictured in the paper, Basayev's "dead man's chest".
The late terrorist's supporters said that they doubted the account.
The rebels' main website likened it to the script from "a third-rate Russian blockbuster".
- INDEPENDENT