Al-Qa'idah representatives active on the territory of Chechnya and organizing acts of terrorism in neighbouring regions have set up a form of criminal business, receiving millions of dollars from sponsors abroad in foreign banks, Federal Security Service [FSB] public relations centre head Sergey Ignatenko said today.Ignatenko said the bulk of funds and orders to plan acts of terrorism come from abroad and al-Qa'idah leaders active in Chechnya recruit people to carry these out for relatively small sums. "The evidence we have suggests that a maximum of 2,000 dollars is given to the family of dead terrorists in payment for carrying out acts of terrorism," he said.
"It is a different matter that those issuing the orders and the leaders receive considerable sums, which never enter Chechnya but remain in foreign bank accounts, which each terrorist leader has," the FSB spokesman said. He pointed out that after the elimination of Khattab in 2002 the Saudi press wrote a great deal about his estate amounting to 40m dollars and his family were in litigation for a long time over this inheritance. "Our intelligence says similar sums went into accounts held by Abu Walid and Abu Khavs (who succeeded Khattab)," he said.
According to the special services, representatives of foreign extremist organizations began to appear on the territory of the former USSR in the 1990s. "It was at that time that we first began to observe the activity of extremist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and a number of others which are now brought together in al-Qa'idah. That was when a diffuse underground network appeared and in 1996-99 representatives of radical Muslim organizations set up a zone inside Chechnya where saboteurs and terrorists were trained and 16 camps to train experts in mines and explosives and snipers, as well as propaganda specialists.
"We are now up against a serious enemy, since the terrorists operate covertly and have a fairly diffuse network which has been established for a decade with well-organized funding from abroad, which is forcing us to restructure our work." Therefore "in our view, operations which we carry out must produce good results", Ignatenko said.
He named Abu Khavs, Abu Umar, Abu Barri - known as "the white Arab", Abdulla, Abu Zeys and Dzhabara, who is Abu Khavs's deputy, as active foreign terrorist leaders. Many foreign terrorists, not all from Middle East countries, have been killed in counter-terrorist operations but it is difficult to give a precise figure because "as a rule, most of the foreigners are not using documents so it is hard to identify them". He cited the example of foreigners killed taking part in the Beslan school siege whose country of origin has still not been identified.
According to the special services, it is foreign terrorists, mainly Arabs, who are protecting [Shamil] Basayev. Their intelligence says that "Basayev was abroad for a fairly long time but recently has been turning up in Chechnya from time to time and going abroad frequently".