The Federal Security Service said Wednesday that it had captured Ali Taziyev, an insurgent ringleader responsible for hundreds of deaths in Ingushetia.
FSB director Alexander Bortnikov reported the capture of the native Ingush in a televised meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev.
"In 2009, he organized explosions in the Interior Ministry in Nazran, resulting in a large number of deaths of law enforcement officers," Bortnikov said on state-run Rossia-24 television.
The suicide bombing of the police headquarters in the Ingush city killed 24 and injured more than 200.
Bortnikov said Taziyev, nicknamed "Magas" after Ingushetia's capital, was also behind an attack by militants on police and government offices in Nazran in 2004 that killed 79 people.
Taziyev, shown in pictures on unofficial Islamist sites sporting a long beard and heavily armed, was also behind a series of other attacks on public transportation in the North Caucasus over the last six years, Bortnikov added.
Describing Taziyev as a "leader of the criminal underground," Bortnikov said he was responsible as well for a suicide bomb attack on Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov last year. Yevkurov survived the attack with serious injuries.
State television said Taziyev is one of the leaders of an envisaged Caucasus Emirate that seeks to create a state under sharia law independent from Russia.
Bortnikov did not describe how Taziyev was captured. He said Taziyev was being transferred to Moscow but did not elaborate on what awaited him there.
(Reuters, AP, MT)
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