Chechnya Russia

The last elected president of independent Chechnya lived and died in a nondescript basement on a street corner in this village of low, rolling plains and neatly gated courtyards a few miles north of the Chechen capital. Or perhaps he didn't. The truth of exactly how Aslan Maskhadov died may never be known, in part because five days after footage was shown of his body sprawled in a pool of blood, Russian authorities blew up the house and reduced it to broken bricks and splintered lumber.

Less than two years ago, Akhmad Kadyrov Street was one of the endless thoroughfares of rubble and weeds that crisscross Chechnya, the scar tissue of Russia's systematic bombing campaign against the separatist republic. No more. Today, shaded with trees and framed neatly with sidewalks, it features a new sports club, basketball court, gymnasium, orphanage, boxing gym and Chechnya's only functioning hotel -- before the rubble takes over again at the end of the block.

Authorities have recovered a cache of poisons and a truck loaded with explosives they believe were intended for use in terrorist attacks during a visit here next week by President Bush and more than 50 other world leaders, police said Thursday. Maj. Gen.

A letter attributed to Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev said late Saturday that militants under his control burned down a Moscow theater last week and that more fighters were preparing similar attacks across Russia. The Chechen rebel website www.kavkazcenter.com posted the letter claiming responsibility for a fire late Thursday at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko theater in central Moscow, the city's second most important ballet and opera venue.

Seven kidnapped relatives of Aslan Maskhadov, the former leader of Chechnya, returned to their village, said the human rights group Memorial and prosecutors in the Russian region. Maskhadov was killed by Russian forces in March. The seven were abducted in December. One told a Memorial representative they were held in a small room at a military facility by Chechen-speaking guards. The relatives told Memorial that they were not interrogated or tortured.

It was shortly after midnight on June 26, 2003, when Akhmad Shamayev began to understand the price he would pay to act as the Moscow-backed Muslim spiritual leader of war-torn Chechnya. Tiptoeing so quietly that no one heard them, several gunmen entered the home of a 72-year-old relative of the mufti and shot him to death in his bed. The price became almost unbearable an hour later.

An explosion derailed a train bound from Chechnya to Moscow on Sunday, injuring eight people seriously enough to be hospitalized as festivities began for the Russian version of independence day. Authorities were looking for two men seen near the derailment, which occurred about 90 miles south of Moscow when the equivalent of 6 pounds of TNT exploded under the front fender of the locomotive. A remote-control detonating device was found about 50 yards from the tracks.

A Chechen separatist leader ordered the contract killing in Moscow last year of prominent U.S. investigative journalist Paul Klebnikov, Russian prosecutors said Thursday, a charge that drew immediate skepticism from analysts. The Russian prosecutor general's office said its investigation concluded that Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, a onetime deputy prime minister of Russia's southern republic of Chechnya, ordered the killing. He and two other suspects were being sought in the case, it said.

In a war of horrors, it was one of the worst chapters. On the morning of Feb. 5, 2000, more than 100 Russian contract soldiers and riot police entered the village of Novye Aldi in Chechnya, sweeping from house to house in a futile search for separatist rebels. What followed was what human rights investigators would later describe as "an orgy of killing, arson and rape." More than 55 civilians, ranging in age from 1 to 82, were shot, strangled or burned in their homes.

An ambush and explosion killed 14 people and injured 21 others Tuesday in northern Chechnya in what authorities said was a meticulously planned attack that targeted a region previously thought to be firmly under the control of the Russian government. Eleven law enforcement officers and three youths were killed when a jeep packed with the equivalent of more than 17 pounds of TNT exploded at a busy intersection in the town of Znamenskoye.