Shamil Basayev, the Chechen rebel leader behind some of Russia's worst terrorist outrages including the Beslan school siege, has been killed, Russian officials said today.

Russia's most wanted man was killed in a special forces operation overnight in the southern province of Ingushetia, which neighbours Chechnya.

His death was formally announced by Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), in a televised meeting with President Putin.

He gave no more details, but Ingush officials said
that Basayev was killed when a truck carrying explosives blew up next his car during a special forces operation in the Ingush village of Ekazhevo.

“Basayev was identified through the body parts. As far as I know, he was identified by the head,” said Bashir Aushev, Deputy Prime Minister of Ingushetia.

“All his characteristic features are there.” Basayev lost his right foot to a landmine in 2000 and wore a wooden prosthetic leg.

A Chechen rebel website later confirmed Basayev’s
death, but said it was caused by the accidental
explosion of a truck.

“There was no special operation. Shamil and other brothers of ours became martyrs by the will of Allah,”, it quoted Abu Umar, from the rebel parliament’s
military committee, as saying.

Basayev, 41, boasted that he had organised the Beslan school siege in September 2004, although he did not personally take part.

More than 330 people died - most of them children - when Russian special forces stormed a school where Chechen Islamist militants were holding more than a thousand pupils, parents and teachers hostage in a gym.

He also claimed responsibility for a series of other outrages including the Moscow theatre siege in October 2002, when 42 Chechen hostage-takers and 130 hostages were gassed to death by Russian forces in another rescue attempt which went horrifically wrong.

After hearing of Basayev's death, Mr Putin said: "This is a just punishment of the bandits for our children in Beslan, in Budyonnovsk, for all the terrorist attacks that they carried out in Moscow and in other regions of Russia."

Mr Patrushev said that at the time he died, Basayev had been planning an attack in southern Russia to coincide with Russia's hosting of the G8 summit of world leaders this weekend, in an attempt to "put political pressure on the Russian leadership".

Many other rebels were killed in the incident in which Basayev died, Mr Patrushev told Mr Putin, in a meeting which was shown on Russian state television.

The Kremlin-backed president of Chechnya, Alu Alkhanov, said the slaying of Basayev was a decisive turning point in the battle of Russian forces against the Chechen rebels.

"I think today can be considered the logical conclusion of the heavy struggle that the special services, the federal forces and law enforcement bodies have been waging against illegal armed groups" in Chechnya, he told the Interfax news agency.

Basayev was born in Vedeno, in southeastern Chechnya, in 1965 into a Chechen family and named after Imam Shamil, a leader of the anti-Russian resistance in the 19th century Caucasian War.

He started his terrorist activities after a declaration of Chechen independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991and was one of three men who hijacked an Aeroflot plane to Turkey in October that year.

He then moved to the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia, where he rose to the rank of deputy defence minister, before becoming a frontline commander in Chechnya after the Russian invasion of 1994.

It was during that conflict that Basayev started to evolve his terrorist ideology and target civilian targets in Russia. The most famous such attack was the six-day siege of a hospital in the southern city of Budyonnovsk in June 1995, in which 129 people were killed.

He became overall commander of the Chechen armed forces in 1996 and briefly served as prime minister under President Aslan Mashkadov in 1998. In January 2000, during the rebel retreat from Grozny at the start of the second Chechen war, he lost a foot after stepping on a landmine.

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