If Vitali Kaloyev killed anyone in Georgia he is not telling. One thing is for sure, though — the “Ossetian of the Year 2007” can wield a knife to deadly effect. The 52-year-old engineer, who is Deputy Building Minister of North Ossetia, has a bloody track record.

In February 2004 he stabbed to death a Zurich-based air traffic controller who was on duty the night that Kaloyev's wife and two children died in a mid-air collision.

The Swiss court that sentenced him to eight years in prison heard grisly details of the revenge attack: Kaloyev had turned up at the home of the controller, showed him pictures of his dead family, then plunged a 14cm (5in) blade into the man's stomach, heart and face.

Released early for good behaviour, Kaloyev has been drawn from his own tragedy and crime into the mess of the Russian-Georgian war. As soon as Russian radio announced that South Ossetia was coming under Georgian attack he got into his ministerial car and drove through the Caucasus mountains to join his fellow-Ossetians. Kaloyev, said his neighbours, has gone to war — again.

It was only a day trip, but time enough to put his talents at the disposal of the South Ossetian fighters. Their protectors, column after column of Russian tanks, were rumbling southwards and Kaloyev simply slipped into a gap within the convoy.

On the car radio he could hear the voice of the Russian Prime Minister,Vladimir Putin: no one fires on Russians and goes unpunished, he said. Those words were to be Kaloyev's motto that day, resounding with his powerful sense of vengeful justice.

“You have to understand,” he told a reporter from the German newspaper Die Zeit after returning from the brief war. “Whoever hits me, is hit back.” The Caucasus is ruled by the principle of justified blood revenge: no-one trusts the police, the courts or the state. Justice is personal.

It was a culture shock for Switzerland when Kaloyev, distraught and full of rage, arrived in the country in 2002, demanding explanations and revenge.

The Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev 154 had been carrying schoolchildren to summer holidays in Spain; his wife, 10-year-old son Konstantin and 4-year-old daughter Diana almost missed the connection. Crossing from Switzerland into Germany over Lake Constance, the aircraft found itself on the same course as a DHL cargo jet.

The air traffic controller, alone in the tower and with a defective telephone, told the Russian pilot to dive; his on-board crash avoidance system told the pilot to climb. The pilot followed the human voice, not the machine, and more than 71 people, most of them children, died.

Kaloyev was the first relative on the crash site in Überlingen, a tiny lakeside resort.He found his daughter under a tree, as if asleep, her face scratched.

On the first anniversary of the accident he returned to the crash scene, poured Ossetian cognac in the field where he had found his family, confronted the head of the air traffic control company, and demanded to speak to the man who had been on duty. The company refused. No one noticed that Kaloyev was at war.

When he later returned home to Vladikavkas, having been released from jail for good behaviour, he was hailed as a hero. Radio listeners voted him Ossetian of the Year and presented him with a bronze statue of a warrior. Hundreds greeted him at Moscow airport.

In North Ossetia he joined the Cabinet and his fame spread to South Ossetia. When he came to join his South Ossetian cousins last week the whole proxy government came out to hug him.

He is a warrior whose war is still not yet over. Back from the front in Georgia, Kaloyev repeats: “Whoever hits me, gets hit back.”

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