Russia: Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov was killed yesterday in a dramatic commando operation by Russian special forces. The former Chechen president, who had helped to direct the five-year war against Russia, was killed in a raid on a village in the province where he had been hiding.
Television pictures showed the body of the grey-bearded commander lying on his back with combat shirt open, his eyes open, shortly after the raid.
Confirmation of his death came in dramatic fashion with a hastily arranged TV interview between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Nikolai Patrushev, head of FSB, the secret service.
Akhmed Zakayev, Maskhadov's main envoy in the West, said in London the rebels would name a successor to their veteran leader within days. "It is a very big loss, but it is not a death blow to us, as Putin thinks," Mr Zakayev said.
For Russia, this is both a breakthrough and a reverse: Mr Maskhadov is the highest-profile target Russia has hit and the ability to find and kill him is a rare success after many military failures.
It follows a summer in which Chechen rebels destroyed two airliners and brought terror to the streets of Moscow.
Equally, his death may choke off what hope there was of peace.
A month ago, Mr Maskhadov announced a ceasefire in the province in an attempt to persuade Moscow to enter into peace talks.
Peace groups in Europe joined in calls for Russia to seize this olive branch but the Kremlin has refused to budge. Last Friday Mr Maskhadov repeated calls for peace and, through a rebel website, said he was hopeful of a meeting soon with Mr Putin.
"We think that 30 minutes of honest eye-to-eye talk would be enough to end this war, so as to explain to the Russian president what Chechens want," he said.
"If reason triumphs among our Kremlin opponents, we can end this war at the negotiating table."
This initiative is now gone and there is no clear successor.
Mr Maskhadov was born in exile in Kazakhstan in 1951, after Stalin deported the entire Chechen population out of the province in the second World War.
He joined the Soviet army and spent a year in the Russian army, its successor, before becoming chief of the embryonic Chechen republic forces in 1992. Two years later he led these forces in rebellion against Russia, pushing Moscow's troops out of the capital Grozny, signing a ceasefire in 1996.
He was elected president of the republic in 1997, intending to pilot a path of autonomy within the Russian Federation. But a rival commander, Shamil Basayev, launched raids into neighbouring Dagestan in defiance of his orders in 1999 and Russia invaded in August of that year.
In the war that followed, Chechen forces split between the two rival warlords. Mr Basayev is top of Russia's most wanted list and has cultivated links with Wahhabist Middle East volunteers, who fight alongside his troops.
There was no love lost between the two men. Mr Maskhadov blamed his rival for bringing war upon the province and vowed to bring him to justice. Last month he said that as part of any peace deal, he would hand Basayev to an international war crimes court, though catching him could have been difficult.
The Kremlin has labelled both men as terrorists, accusing Mr Maskhadov of having links with al-Qaeda.