Former leader of Chechen force shot dead in Moscow

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
The former head of one of Chechnya's shadowy security forces was fatally shot in Moscow by law enforcement officers who were trying to detain him on suspicion of abductions and killings in the violence-plagued southern region, officials said. Movladi Baisarov was shot Saturday while resisting officers on a main avenue in the capital, Moscow prosecutor's office spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said. A prosecutor at the scene, Irina Bobinova, said he had pulled out a grenade when police tried to arrest him after he got out of a car. Baisarov headed a force that reportedly provided security for the separatist Chechen leadership in the late 1990s and later for the region's first pro-Moscow president, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in 2004, but had been on increasingly bad terms with Kadyrov's son Ramzan, Chechnya's powerful prime minister. Baisarov's body lay in the street on Moscow's Lenin Avenue late Saturday, the face bloodied and a pool of blood around the head and shoulder. Police milled around the corpse, still clad in a leather coat and a light scarf.