RUSSIA: Chechnya's pro-Kremlin officials rejoiced yesterday after a car-bomb killed a former president of the region, Mr Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, in an attack that separatist guerrillas called an assassination by Moscow's secret service, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow
The blast killed Mr Yandarbiyev (51) and seriously injured his teenage son as they were returning from Friday prayers at a mosque in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where the Kremlin accused him of controlling the finances of rebel groups and maintaining links with al-Qaeda.
Some reports said two other passengers in Mr Yandarbiyev's car were also killed, and Russian television showed pools of blood beneath a mangled and burned-out white jeep, a few hundred metres from the mosque where he prayed.
"You won't find anyone in Chechnya who regrets what happened to Yandarbiyev," said Mr Akhmad Kadyrov, who was elected president of the province in rigged elections last year.
"Yandarbiyev was the separatists' main ideologue, and that of the terrorist organisations that have brought such grim consequences to Chechnya. He was guilty of everything that happened."
The poet and writer was prominent in the independence movement that emerged in Chechnya as the Soviet Union crumbled, and he became president of the region after Russian forces blew up its talismanic leader, Dzhokhar Dudayev, in April 1996.
He held his post until elections in January 1997 that brought Mr Aslan Maskhadov to power and ushered in two years of de-facto independence until President Boris Yeltsin and his prime minister Vladimir Putin sent troops back into Chechnya in autumn 1999. They are still there, and the war shows no signs of abating.
Russia's FSB domestic security service commented with unusual haste on Mr Yandarbiyev's death, saying it was probably the result of a blood feud among Chechen gangs or the result of a battle to control separatist purse strings.
Mr Boris Labusov, the elusive spokesman for the secretive Foreign Intelligence Service, was also quick to deny responsibility for the attack, while Russian officials hailed Mr Yandarbiyev's death as a victory for the so-called war on terror.
"What's happened to Yandarbiyev proves again that terrorism devours its own actors and ideologues," said Mr Vladimir Zorin, Russia's Minister for Nationality Issues.
On their websitethe rebels vowed revenge for what they called "a crime that leads to the door of the Kremlin and the Lubyanka", referring to the Moscow headquarters of the FSB.