Akhmad Kadyrov, politician

Died: 9 May, 2004, in Grozny, aged 52

AKHMAD Kadyrov, Moscow’s man in Chechnya, had been a target of guerrillas since he abandoned armed separatist rebellion to seek peace within Russia.

Kadyrov, bearded and thickset and often wearing a traditional sheepskin hat, interrupted his studies at a Muslim university in Oman in 1991 to join the Chechen rebellion and rose to the position of mufti, a respected spiritual leader. In 1995, he proclaimed a jihad, or holy war, against Russia, which withdrew its troops from Chechnya the following year after an agreement that ended a bloody and, for Moscow, humiliating war.

But three years later, he accused rebel leaders of fostering militant Islam and switched over to the side of Vladimir Putin, then the Russian prime minister and now the president, who launched a fresh war in Chechnya in October 1999.

Kadyrov, from then on "enemy of the nation number one" in the eyes of the rebels, was elected regional president in October under a Kremlin peace plan and maintained a tough grip on Chechnya. In recent weeks, he had been campaigning for the withdrawal of most Russian forces and handing over formal control over Chechnya to his armed supporters.

Akhmad Kadyrov was born in Kazakhstan, where Chechens had been exiled en masse in 1944 by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on unproven charges of collaborating with the Nazi invaders. Three years later, his family returned to Chechnya.

He studied Islam in the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan and became an imam. Between 1986 and 1988, he was deputy imam of the central mosque in Gudermes, Chechnya’s second-largest city, and he founded an Islamic institute the following year.

In December 1994, Russian troops swept into Chechnya to put down the rebels’ bid for independence, and Kadyrov commanded a division in the 20-month war. But he fell out with rebel leaders Aslan Maskhadov and Shamil Basayev in 1999, blaming them for bringing radical Muslims into the rebels’ ranks. In particular, he blamed Basayev for leading an incursion into neighbouring Dagestan, a move that helped ignite the second Chechen war in September of that year. Maskhadov, who was elected Chechnya’s president in 1997, dismissed him in 1999 for meeting with Putin.

The Kremlin named Kadyrov head of Chechnya’s civilian administration in 2000, and entrusted him with organising a 2003 referendum that would approve a constitution cementing Chechnya’s status as an inseparable part of Russia.

While Kadyrov and the Kremlin depended on one another, they had a sometimes prickly relationship: he blamed Russian forces for violence against civilians, and government auditors accused his administration of misappropriating funds earmarked for reconstruction. Kadyrov also decried Russian prejudices against Chechens, saying that it was a crime to label an entire people as criminal.

In spite of occasional tensions, the Kremlin put gravel-voiced Kadyrov forward as its candidate for president in October last year and he won with a huge margin, according to official results. But the vote was widely denounced by critics after two candidates who rated higher than Kadyrov in early opinion polls disappeared from the ballot, and observers said that, in contrast to the high official turnout figures, most polling stations were largely empty.

Kadyrov’s popularity had already been declining sharply in Chechnya amid accusations that his security service, headed by his son Ramzan, was responsible for a wave of disappearances, killings and violence. But the Kremlin never directly addressed those accusations, and Putin stood by his man.

In a televised broadcast yesterday, Putin said: "For the last four years, the president of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, fulfilled his duty before his people with dignity and courage. He was a truly heroic person. By his activities he convincingly proved that the bandits and the people cannot be put on the same footing."