Rebel Ideologist Killed After Filming Last Sermon

A Muslim convert accused of organizing the deadly Nevsky Express train bombing in November and a series of other attacks was killed by special forces in Ingushetia shortly after he recorded a farewell online sermon, officials said.

Islamic insurgents confirmed the death of Said Buryatsky, 28, on their web sites Monday and posted a photograph of the bearded Buryatsky's blood-splattered face. The rebels said Buryatsky became a "martyr" on March 2.

Buryatsky, chief ideologist of the North Caucasus rebels, and seven other rebels were killed in an operation led by the Federal Security Service in the Ingush village of Ekazhevo, the Investigative Committee said. Ten suspects were also detained.

FSB director Alexander Bortnikov told President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday that investigators believe that the rebels were behind November's Nevsky Express bombing that killed 28 passengers and injured more than 90 others.

"DNA tests have been made of the bandits to determine whether they were involved in the Nevky Express train bombing in November last year. These materials give us cause to believe that these particular men participated in that attack," Bortnikov said, according to a transcript of the meeting published on the Kremlin's web site.

He added that the FSB found a cache of explosives, arms and bomb-making equipment at the site of the special operation.

According to an FSB statement, commandos surrounded the suspects in two houses in Ekazhevo and killed those who refused to surrender. Two passports — one national and the other for foreign travel — issued in the name of Alexander Tikhomirov were found on the body of one of the gunmen. Subsequent DNA tests confirmed the man's identity as Buryatsky.

Buryatsky was born as Alexander Tikhomirov in the Buddhist republic of Buryatia and converted to Islam as a teenager. Buryatsky was an active religious commentator who studied Islam in different madrassas in Moscow, Tatarstan and then in Egypt from 2002 to 2005 where he studied at Al-Azhar University, the main center of Islamic learning in the world.

Buryatsky, unlike most Muslim leaders in Russia, made his mark on the Internet, posting dozens of videos of his sermons online and thus surging in popularity among young Russian Muslims.

Buryatsky spent the last minutes of his life filming a farewell sermon on his cell phone and saying goodbye to his fellow rebels, according to the rebel web site Hunafa and RIA-Novosti, which cited an unidentified FSB official. The house where the rebels were holed up had been surrounded by the FSB commandos, and the rebels understood that they would not be able to escape, the FSB official said.

The FSB said Buryatsky joined the North Caucasus rebels in mid-2008, and within months a series of suicide bombings ended a four-year break in the rebel tactic, which had last been used at the Beslan school hostage-taking in 2004. Among the largest attacks was a suicide car bombing of Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov's motorcade that badly wounded Yevkurov in June and a suicide car bombing that killed 26 people at a Nazran police station a few days later.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said Buryatsky was the "rebels' No. 1 ideologist" and accused him of being a foreign agent.

"Alexander Tikhomirov was an agent who was very well trained in religion by Western special services. He was also a psychologist, and his task was to influence not only a certain part of the North Caucasus youth but — with the help of the Internet — all of Russia," Kadyrov said Sunday, Interfax reported.

Kadyrov has publicly lashed out at his loyal Muslim clergymen, complaining that they were failing to counter Buryatsky's propaganda among Muslim youth.

In July, Kadyrov accused Buryatsky of trying to kill him after a suicide bomber detonated himself in a Grozny theater where Kadyrov had planned to attend a performance. Seven people died in the explosion.

Buryatsky claimed responsibility for the attack on the Nazran police station in a series of letters describing how he trained the bomber that were published on two rebel web sites, Hunafa and Kavkaz Center.

Hunafa has become a major podium for Buryatsky over the past two years, and each of his online lectures, many about various aspects of jihad, have garnered dozens of supportive comments from viewers.

The FSB said investigators retrieved equipment from the house where the suspects were detained that was identical to that used in a bombing of the Nevsky Express train in 2007. No one died in that attack, and two Ingush natives have been convicted of delivering explosives to the Tver region, where the bombing took place.

 The rebels have claimed responsibility for both Nevsky Express bombings, but Buryatsky never acknowledged personal involvement in either attack.

Curiously, it was in Ekazhevo where the FSB tracked down and killed former Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev in July 2006. Basayev had made suicide attacks his trademark strategy.

Yevkurov, the Ingush president who survived the assassination attempt last June, applauded Buryatsky's death but cautioned that the fight against insurgency was far from over.

"He was killed, but his place will be taken by another ideologist," Yevkurov said, RIA-Novosti reported.