Biography
Shamil Basayev was born in 1965 in Dyshne-Vedeno in south-eastern Chechnya. After school and military service as an airfield firefighter he worked on a state farm, studied briefly at a Moscow land-management institute until he was expelled in 1988, and sold computers in Moscow. In November 1991, after Russia moved troops toward breakaway Chechnya, he took part in hijacking an Aeroflot airliner to Turkey; the hostages were released unharmed.
In 1992 he led Chechen volunteers fighting for Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, and then commanded the forces of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus on the Abkhaz side in the war with Georgia. When Russia invaded Chechnya in 1994 he became a front-line commander. In June 1995 his fighters seized the hospital at Budyonnovsk in southern Russia, a raid that cost well over a hundred civilian lives but forced a pause in the Russian offensive, and in August 1996 he helped plan and lead the recapture of Grozny.
Basayev finished second to Aslan Maskhadov in the 1997 Chechen presidential election and then served in his government, briefly as acting prime minister in 1998, before breaking with him. In 1999 he and Ibn al-Khattab led an armed incursion into Dagestan, which preceded the Second Chechen War.
During that war he turned to mass hostage-taking and bombings. He claimed responsibility for the 2002 Moscow theatre siege, the 2002 truck bombing of the Chechen government headquarters, the 2004 assassination of Akhmad Kadyrov and the 2004 Beslan school siege, and was designated a terrorist by the United States and the United Nations. He was killed by an explosion during an arms delivery in Ingushetia on 10 July 2006.
