RUSSIA: Movsar Barayev, the leader of the group of militant Chechens behind the Moscow theatre hostage drama, is not a man to remain above the nitty-gritty of terror. It is believed that on one occasion, he led the interrogation of two kidnapped Grozny women suspected of being informers against the Chechen rebels.
A videotape records the torture he inflicted, and then, according to official Chechen security sources, after the "confessions", he personally beheaded one of the women, a Russian.
Itar/Tass, the Russian news agency quotes a Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, attached to Russia's North Caucasus regional counter-terrorism forces, describing the torture from a video allegedly seized from a dead rebel.
It would not be the first time that the separatist rebels associated with Barayev had beheaded a prisoner. In 1998 his uncle, Arbi Barayev, kidnapped and beheaded two Britons and a New Zealander.
A former member of the mainstream Chechen resistance under Aslan Maskhadov, Arbi Barayev broke away to form his own group after Maskhadov demoted him from general to the ranks. Relations between the two men were said to be severely strained.
The new group became active in the wake of the first Chechen war, mainly engaging in kidnappings, about 1996.
The Barayev group is understood to be supporters of the ultra-puritanical Wahhabist strain of Islam, which is predominant in Saudi Arabia and is backed by Osama bin Laden.
Movsar Barayev, formerly Movsar Suleimenov and believed to be about 25 years of age, took the name of his uncle, a leader of one of the most deadly and cruel of Chechen groups, after he died in a clash with Russian forces in June 2001.
The young Movsar, a native of Mesker-Yurt 20 km south of the the country's capital Grozny, is blamed for a car bomb attack in Alkhan-Yurt, his uncle's home town, in December 2000 in which 20 died and 17 were injured. He is alleged to have been involved in a bloody feud to take control of his uncle's group, involving the killing of several rivals, security sources say.
The group is said to be 300-strong, although one Russian source is quoted as saying it may be a front for more powerful figures.
Movsar has twice been reported dead by the Russian authorities, as recently as 10 days ago when he was alleged to have blown himself up in a suicide bombing.
Barayev is quoted on the Chechen website kavkaz.org as saying his supporters in the Moscow siege were there "to die, not survive".
