ONE of the most senior rebel leaders in the war-torn Russian republic of Chechnya was killed yesterday in the latest blow to Islamic insurgents fighting Moscow.

Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev was shot dead in Argun, a town 20 miles east of the bombed-out capital Grozny, by Chechen special forces loyal to the Kremlin.

In characteristically bloodsoaked style, Ramzan Kadyrov, the prime minister, announced that he would put the body on display as soon as possible.

News of Sadulayev’s death was hailed as evidence that rebels have all but lost their war against Russia.

“The terrorists have been virtually beheaded,” said Kadyrov, whose father Akhmad, the former pro-Moscow Chechen president, was blown up by rebels two years ago. “They have sustained a severe blow, and they are never going to recover from it.”

Sadulayev became the rebels’ president 15 months ago after his more charismatic predecessor, Aslan Maskhadov, who spent years in hiding, was killed by the Russians.

Sadulayev, a mullah who turned to arms, had served as a judge on the Chechen rebels’ sharia committee — an extension of the Islamic court established under Maskhadov when he was Chechnya’s elected president in the late 1990s.

Russian prosecutors accused Sadulayev of organising the 2001 kidnapping of Kenneth Gluck, an American who worked for Médecins sans Frontières in southern Russia. He was held hostage for 25 days.

Under Sadulayev’s leadership, attacks by his rebel fighters have spread beyond Chechnya’s borders to the rest of the North Caucasus in close collaboration with his ally Shamil Basayev, Russia’s most wanted terrorist and the mastermind of the Moscow theatre and Beslan school sieges in which a total of almost 500 people died.

Hostage-taking raids and a string of suicide bombings spread in recent months to the neighbouring republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia.

Last week Ingushetia’s special forces chief was gunned down with his three young children, a brother and a guard. Rebels have also killed the deputy interior minister, kidnapped the president’s father-in-law and attempted to kill the health minister.

In February Sadulayev reorganised his rebel government to make it more radical. In a rebuff to moderate envoys working in Europe, he called on all officials working abroad to return home.

Chechnya, which has seen two wars and lost almost 100,000 people in the past decade, has become more stable in the past year. But Sadulayev’s death is unlikely to put an end to terrorist attacks.

He is expected to be replaced by Doku Umarov, an even more extreme terrorist and one of the alleged organisers of the Beslan school siege.

Last week Basayev, who has a $10m price on his head, boasted that he had paid $50,000 to arrange for the assassination of Kadyrov’s father, who was blown up in May 2004 in a Grozny football stadium during a military parade.

He also vowed to kill Kadyrov himself who is supported by Vladimir Putin and is widely expected to become Chechnya’s president later this year.

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