Chechen With Links to Moscow Is Arrested : Crisis: Opposition leader Jamalkhanov gave an ultimatum to a military commander to free war prisoners or face bombing.

As new hope for a cease-fire faded, authorities in Chechnya arrested a Russian-backed opposition leader Wednesday while he was trying to set up talks on the release of 46 Russian paratroopers captured in the war against the breakaway republic.

Musa Jamalkhanov, a prominent political foe of Chechen President Dzhokar M. Dudayev, was taken into custody here before an agitated crowd of Chechens after handing the local military commander an ultimatum to free the war prisoners or else Russian warplanes would bomb his residence.

The incident in Shali, 24 miles south of the Chechen capital of Grozny, was just one sign of trouble for the latest efforts to halt more than five weeks of fighting that have taken thousands of lives and thrown Russia into a political crisis.

It also indicated that attempts to negotiate freedom for prisoners of war on both sides will be just as hard as ending the massive Russian military operation to crush this tiny Muslim republic’s self-declared independence.

On another day of destructive fighting in Grozny, Russia’s divided government balked at a cease-fire proposed Monday by Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and accepted by two of Dudayev’s envoys on a visit to Moscow on Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters in Nazran, a town on the Chechen border, the envoys said Chernomyrdin had agreed to halt bombing and artillery fire Wednesday evening as a first step toward peace. But they said the Russian commander named to work out details of the accord failed to meet them as scheduled in Nazran, and the fighting did not let up.

In Moscow, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin appeared to undermine the initiative by ruling out any deal with Dudayev, whom he accused of committing “genocide against his own people.”

Yeltsin, claiming to be in full control of the Russian army, said he is willing to deal only with individual Chechen military commanders and local officials.

In line with that strategy, Jamalkhanov and a former mayor of Shali, Sherip Khalidov, returned from exile in Russia to visit the town’s military commander, Aslanbek Abdulhadjiyev, on Tuesday with a letter from two Russian officials.

The letter, signed by counterintelligence chief Sergei V. Stepashin and Nikolai D. Yegorov, Yeltsin’s minister of nationalities, said that the homes of the commander and Shali’s security chief would be bombed unless the paratroopers were freed.

But the answer from the Chechen commander spelled trouble for any Kremlin notion of dividing the Chechens. He refused to negotiate their freedom without Dudayev’s approval, saying: “It’s not Shali waging this war. It’s all Chechnya.”

Armed villagers captured the paratroopers Jan. 7 in a Caucasus mountain hamlet not far from here during a failed mission to find a Chechen arms depot. Despite Russian threats to bomb the hamlet and offers to buy the soldiers’ freedom, the Chechens have refused to let them go.

Fears of a Russian air raid here grew Tuesday night when a bookstore near the prison where the paratroopers are being held caught fire. Fifteen homes in the threatened Chechen officials’ neighborhood were evacuated.

*

Jamalkhanov showed up Wednesday for the third time in two days to insist on negotiations. The commander promptly escorted him from army headquarters to the prison next door to be held on a year-old charge of treason for his opposition to Dudayev.

The arrest set off a loud quarrel among two dozen Chechen witnesses outside the prison.

“Let’s listen to this man, because he has come here to negotiate,” one man shouted. “Negotiators should not be arrested.”

“We will tear this scoundrel to pieces,” another said. “He should be hanged.”

Abu Movsayev, Shali’s security chief, said the paratroopers were being well-fed and well-treated--an assertion confirmed by a Russian deserter held in the same prison.

The number of war prisoners on the Chechen and Russian sides is unclear. The Helsinki branch of Human Rights Watch, an international organization, has urged both sides to list their captives and allow neutral outsiders to visit them.

It said last week that the Chechens had reported holding about 80 Russians, and it expressed concern that the Russians have not acknowledged holding any Chechens.

Russia’s government press service said Wednesday that 50 Russian POWs were being held by 120 Chechen defenders of Dudayev’s presidential palace, the main target of the offensive. The Chechens say they have freed hundreds of other Russians soldiers, delivering some to relatives who arrived in Grozny.

Chechen officials also claim that the Russian army has imprisoned thousands of fighting-age men on the territory they occupy in northern Chechnya.

“Detention is a very touchy issue,” said Erik Reumann, a spokesman for the International Red Cross. He said the Red Cross was trying to “build confidence” between Russia and Chechnya for a full POW accounting by both sides.

The first reported prisoner exchange--one Russian private for one wounded Chechen rebel--was arranged by a Chechen mayor and a Russian field commander outside the town of Assinovskaya. It occurred Wednesday, a day after an attempt had failed when the Russian side did not appear.

Moscow is eager to get its soldiers freed in order, among other reasons, to blunt one of its enemy’s best propaganda weapons.

The Chechens have allowed reporters to interview captured Russians, who give universal accounts of demoralization and heavy losses.

*

In Shali on Wednesday, an 18-year-old imprisoned Russian draftee, Andrei Vekshin, told The Times that he deserted from a unit near Chechnya’s oil refinery in rebellion against his commander’s orders to shoot “all Chechens, including women and children, anyone who moved.”

At least two more Russians were captured Wednesday in an armored personnel carrier after it smashed into a stall at a roadside market outside the town of Samashki and its occupants stole food. As the Russians drove away, a Chechen fighter in a speeding car overtook them and fired a grenade launcher into the base of the gun turret. Three Russians inside were killed.

Despite heavy Russian shelling in Grozny, Chechen fighters said they were close to wiping out the Russian gains made since New Year’s Day by recapturing the capital’s railroad station. The claim could not be confirmed.

Osman Umayev, one of Chechnya’s two negotiators, said the breakdown of the cease-fire agreement with Chernomyrdin indicated that the Russians are preparing an even bigger assault on Grozny.

Sergei A. Kovalev, Russia’s human rights commissioner, appeared with the Chechen negotiators in Nazran and condemned Yeltsin’s refusal to deal with Dudayev.

Times staff writer Sonni Efron contributed to this report from Moscow.