Since then, he is believed to have overseen many operations in Dagestan. Authorities say his group has been responsible for most of the major assassinations in the republic since 1999.
Surveillance cameras outside the safe house allowed the inhabitants to flee before police closed in, and in the ensuing chase they ended up barricaded in the complex down the street.
After the shootout, police searched the safe house and found what they believed were signs that the insurgents were planning a "Beslan-type" operation. One of the militants -- identified as Makasharipov's cousin -- was wearing an explosive belt. Police found hand grenades, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, guns and 330 pounds of explosives in the house and a nearby car.
Authorities first announced that Makasharipov had been killed in the operation. But the only bodies they have been able to identify are of three young Dagestanis. They are analyzing the DNA of the other two bodies, one of which is so maimed that, in Col. Musayev's words, "it fit into a plastic grocery bag."
"Right now, there's exactly the same probability that he's alive as that he's dead," Musayev said.
Last week, militants struck again. On Feb. 13, a highway patrol car was blown up by a roadside bomb in the Dagestani town of Stepnoy, killing one police officer and injuring three. On Wednesday, a car bomb exploded near the regional administration building in the town of Kizlyar, just as three senior government officials were driving by. A woman passing by was killed and six other people were wounded.
"It's premature to talk about victory. But we know the situation in the battlefield like the back of our hand," said Zagir Arukhov, Dagestan's minister of national policy and information. Arukhov, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the concept of Islamic jihad, or holy war, succeeded the assassinated official.
"Today, when these clashes occur, it is the law-enforcement bodies who are on the front lines," he said. "They are really like a safety net, which the terrorists aspire to remove so they can intimidate the entire society and impregnate it with their teachings.
"We will never allow anything like this to happen," he said.
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Spreading violence
Ten years after Boris Yeltsin first sent Russian troops into Chechnya to put down an attempt at independence, violence has seeped across a tier of adjoining republics creating a band of instability in the northern Caucasus. Some recent examples of the trouble:
