 Death was not punishment enough for Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, the warlord and terrorist killed in an explosion this week, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. "For him this is too little - to be just destroyed," Putin told the Canadian broadcaster CTV when asked what he felt when he heard that Russia's most-wanted man, a militant who claimed responsibility for the nation's deadliest terror attacks, had been killed Monday. "I think that no matter what belief he adhered to, he will get his due in the next world for the evil deeds he committed," Putin said in a portion of the interview shown on state-run television.
Questions linger about the circumstances of Basayev's death, which came just days before a weekend summit of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations that Putin is hosting. Russian officials say a special operation culminated in Basayev's death when a dynamite-filled truck exploded close to his car in a village in Ingushetia, a region bordering Chechnya. Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev insisted the explosion was an accident.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov indicated Wednesday that there was no need for further efforts to identify the remains that authorities say are those of the warlord, whose body was blown apart in the blast. "We have not the slightest doubt that Basayev has been destroyed, which raises the question about the need of conducting identification," Ivanov told a news conference in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.
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Dmitry Kozak, Putin's representative to the restive swath of southern Russia that includes Chechnya, said Basayev's death would "foster the stabilization of the situation in the North Caucasus." The strip of impoverished and mainly Muslim regions in Russia's south have been targeted in attacks launched by Basayev and have also been plagued by violence that Kremlin critics say is provoked by heavy-handed police tactics.
| The fact that the region is "impoverished" might ahve something to do with the fact that it's "mainly Muslim," but we won't go into that. |
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