Russia today said that a top Islamist rebel, deputy to the country's most wanted militant Doku Umarov, was killed in an operation in the North Caucasus region, where Moscow is fighting a bloody insurgency.
Dzhamaleil Mutaliyev, who helped organise a 2010 suicide bombing attack in the city of Vladikavkaz, was one of the two people killed in today's raid on a residential house in Nazran, the main city of Ingushetiya region that borders Chechnya, the national anti-terrorist committee (NAK) said on its website.
It said "Mutaliyev was one of the heads of the insurgency active in Ingushetiya" and a deputy of Doku Umarov, the head of Caucasus Emirate, the militant group that seeks to establish an Islamist state in the region.
Mutaliyev, 37, "was directly responsible for providing terrorists with financial resources, means of military capability, and participated in organising acts of terror with massive death toll," it said.
He was killed along with another man identified as Aliskhan Ozdoyev.
Early last year, the NAK said Mutaliyev was killed in another raid, but he was put back on the wanted list in October after being linked to a suicide bombing.
The NAK said that Mutaliyev joined the guerrillas in North Caucasus during Russia's second war in Chechnya in the early 2000s, and was involved in preparing the 2010 suicide bombing at a market in the southern city of Vladikavkaz, which killed 18.
Caucasus Emirate has claimed several acts of terror in the country, including a bombing in Moscow airport Domodedovo in 2011 that killed 37 people and twin bombings in the Moscow metro in 2010.
