Chechen Rebel Is a Man of Mystery, Even in Death

The last elected president of independent Chechnya lived and died in a nondescript basement on a street corner in this village of low, rolling plains and neatly gated courtyards a few miles north of the Chechen capital. Or perhaps he didn’t.

The truth of exactly how Aslan Maskhadov died may never be known, in part because five days after footage was shown of his body sprawled in a pool of blood, Russian authorities blew up the house and reduced it to broken bricks and splintered lumber. Armed guards now stand sentry to make sure no one gets close enough to inspect the rubble. The owners of the house have been arrested, or have disappeared.

As for the body of the 53-year-old Chechen rebel leader, whom authorities blamed for attacks against military and civilian targets across Russia, no one has seen it, except on the brief video released by police. Authorities have invoked a new law that allows them to refuse to release the bodies of suspected terrorists.

Here in Tolstoy-Yurt, residents are by turns perplexed, disbelieving or fearful -- mostly of the Russian troops who conducted rough house-to-house searches on the day Maskhadov was said have been killed. Police said the separatist leader, who served as Chechnya’s president during a period of self-rule in the late 1990s, was found hiding in the basement of a local welder and was killed by a grenade when he refused to surrender.

“The people here generally disbelieve the official version that he was hiding here. The official version of the story is extremely suspicious, and ... it’s possible that Maskhadov wasn’t even killed here. But how can we say?” said Aslakhan Zakayev, who lives down the street from what had been welder Musa Yusupov’s home.

“I have seen a lot of bodies in my life,” said Ramzan Bolatiyev, the prayer leader at the local mosque. “The Maskhadov they showed on television was the body of someone who had been dead for several days. They brought him here. It was all staged, and that’s why they blew up the house, so nobody could see there was no bunker and no ‘special operation.’ ”

Beyond the usual conspiracy theories, the mystery over Maskhadov’s death stems in part from early statements by Chechen First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov. He is considered the most powerful figure in Chechnya, and his security service has earned a reputation for kidnapping, torture and executions.

Immediately after Maskhadov’s death, Kadyrov announced that the rebel had been accidentally shot by one of his own bodyguards during a siege by federal commandos. A few days later, Kadyrov said he was “just joking about the bodyguard,” and that Maskhadov had indeed been felled by a grenade lobbed by federal forces into his bunker.

This was followed by reports in the Russian media, citing an unidentified source in Kadyrov’s camp, that Maskhadov had been captured elsewhere, then interrogated and killed by Kadyrov’s men. According to those reports, Maskhadov’s body was transported to Tolstoy-Yurt two days later to spare Kadyrov the public wrath that would accompany the death of a man many Chechens regard as a hero.

The questions intensified when the wife of the owner of the house, Yakha Yusupova, was released from custody and vehemently insisted to Associated Press that no one had lived in her basement.

She said armed men came to the house March 8 and detained the family in the yard. A truck then drove up and something was unloaded -- she suspects it may have been Maskhadov. Then, police warned her there would be an explosion, and there was, she said.

Neighbors said Yusupova disappeared shortly after her release from jail, and they were told she had gone to live with relatives in another part of Chechnya.

One neighbor, Aslan Isayev, said Yusupov had a nephew who was thought to have a connection to the rebels. “But you know, in Chechnya, many people have such relatives, and they can’t sever relations with them, they can’t refuse to give them shelter. It is against our traditions,” Isayev said.

The Yusupov family, he said, is well-known in Tolstoy-Yurt. Yusupov’s father, Azim, was a widely read poet; his uncle, Aziz, was a history and literature teacher who helped found a museum in honor of Leo Tolstoy, for whom the village is named. “No one in the village ever associated this family with any resistance activities. It is impossible to hide such things in a village,” Isayev said.

“No one has seen the corpse of Maskhadov here,” Aslakhan Zakayev said. “No one was allowed to go into the house. And after everybody left, after everything had been razed to the ground and reduced to rubble, they told us there was a bunker there. But they didn’t allow us to go and look.”

Still, the reports from other neighbors that Russian police conducted tense house-to-house searches on the day of the explosion suggest they were genuinely looking for the rebel leader.

Shamil Gabarov said police entered his house an hour or two before the first of two explosions at the Yusupov house and searched the basement.

“They told us it’s a regular passport check, and they were trying to catch someone,” Gabarov said. “They were obviously afraid that something was wrong. They were very jittery and scared.”

Meeting with foreign journalists last week, Kadyrov, whose father, Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed in May by a bomb planted at a sports stadium, said he would have been happy to claim authorship of Maskhadov’s demise.

“Maskhadov is not only an enemy of the people ... he is also my personal blood enemy,” Kadyrov said. “And if I had killed him, I would have made a loud statement that very moment that I had just destroyed international terrorist No. 1, based on Russia’s territory.”

Across Chechnya, such sentiments are few. For most, Maskhadov’s death ended not only all hopes for an independent Chechnya, but for any end to the republic’s long separatist war. The pro-Moscow Chechen government had rejected Maskhadov’s repeated calls for peace negotiations, and people now fear more radical elements will dominate the struggle.

Maskhadov “was the president, at the end of the day, at least to us, and killing him is an insult,” said Anya Dadayeva, 53, a market worker.

A resident of the capital, Grozny, Maria Khardonova said: “He was a good man, a good president. He would walk up to the people and talk to them. It was a huge mistake that they killed him, and the worst thing is they’re not giving back his body to his family.

“You see, when Maskhadov became president ... we thought there would be hope for our future. And the other day, when he was killed, the authorities tried to present it as a huge gift,” she said.

“But I can tell you, I did not consider this a present.”

Special correspondent Mayerbek Nunayev contributed to this report.