GROZNY, July 9 (RIA Novosti) - Chechen warlord Magomed Yevloyev masterminded a recent attack on Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the Chechen interior minister said on Thursday.
"He [Yevloyev] personally planned this assassination and supervised the preparations, using the wife of a dead militant as a suicide bomber," Ruslan Alkhanov said.
Yevkurov received serious head and internal injuries when a car bomb exploded as his motorcade passed by on June 22.
He underwent a series of operations and is expected to recover soon, according to an Ingush government spokesman.
Magomed or Akhmed Yevloyev, nicknamed Amir Magas, is believed to be an ethnic Ingush who was raised in Grozny, Chechnya, and who served as a deputy commander under Shamil Basayev in the Second Chechen War.
Basayev is reported to have instructed Yevloyev to use his family and clan ties to begin establishing armed militant groups in Ingushetia.
Russia earlier said Yevloyev had been killed in the 2004 Beslan siege, where he presumably led hostage negotiations under the name of Ali Taziyev, whose body was identified among the dead terrorists after Russian troops stormed the school.
However, it appeared a case of mistaken identity, when two years later Russia said Yevloyev had been involved in the May 2006 assassination of the Ingush deputy interior minister Dzhabrail Kostoyev.
Ingush authorities have said that Akhmed Yevloyev has had more success in recruiting new rebels than any other previous militant warlord in Ingushetia.
Russian sources have also repeatedly blamed him for some of the most deadly attacks on security forces in Ingushetia and neighboring regions, including the raids of Nazran and Nalchik, in which he worked closely with Shamil Basayev and Doka Umarov.
