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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Dead Arab was Kuwaiti al-Qaeda member |
| 2005-05-18 |
| Russian authorities said today a Kuwaiti militant who was an al Qaida emissary to Chechnya has been killed by security forces in a neighbouring region, the second statement in as many days linking foreigners to Chechen rebels. The alleged militant, who went by the single name Jarah, was killed on Tuesday evening along with another suspect during an operation near the Chechen border in Dagestan, said Major General Ilya Shabalkin, the spokesman for the Russian campaign against rebels in Chechnya and surrounding areas. In a statement, Shabalkin said Jarah was an al Qaida emissary in Chechnya and has close connections with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an outlawed Egyptian Islamic movement, and of Al-Haramain, a Saudi Charity that the kingdom's government dissolved last year amid US suspicion that it was bankrolling al Qaida. He said Jarah had been a middleman for the funding of Chechen rebels by foreign terror groups and had helped top rebel leaders — Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov, who was killed earlier this year — to organise "many large terrorist acts." He did not name any specific attacks Jarah allegedly helped plan. Russia authorities say Chechen rebels, fighting their second separatist war in a decade, have been financed by Islamic terrorist groups abroad and that many Arab mercenaries have fought alongside the rebels in the mountainous southern region, in some cases leading groups of militants. According to Shabalkin, whose claims could not be independently confirmed, Jarah received training in Taliban terror camps and was adept at preparing bombs and poisons. He said that Jarah had spent "a long period of time" in the Pankisi Gorge, a region near Chechnya in neighbouring Georgia, and in Azerbaijan. While in Georgia and Azerbaijan, he said the Kuwaiti citizen and unidentified associates received large amounts of money from "foreign terrorist centres" and sent it along to Russia's North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya. Jarah also frequently entered Chechnya, where he moved with rebel groups under Basayev and took part in terror and other attacks, trained militants in explosives and taught them extremist Muslim ideology, Shabalkin said. He was also involved in training female suicide bombers, Shabalkin's statement said. On Tuesday, Shabalkin had announced Russian security forces killed a prominent Chechen rebel he accused of planning chemical attacks. He said the rebel was supposed to carry out the attacks under orders from a Jordanian militant, Abu Mudjaid, who allegedly organised a shipment of toxic substances to Chechnya from abroad. Authorities in Chechnya say many attacks there have been carried out by militants entering from Dagestan, the restive region where Shabalkin said Jarah was killed. Russian and regional officials met today to discuss plans to base a Russian military unit in Dagestan's Botlikh district, an area near the Chechen border where rebels seized villages in 1999 fighting that was one of the catalysts for the Kremlin's decision to send troops into Chechnya that year, starting the second war. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |