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Shamil Basayev, charismatic leader of the Chechen separatist movement and the perpetrator of the some of the most grotesque terrorist attacks of the last decade, was born in 1965 in the mountain town of Vedeno.

Named after Imam Shamil, the Islamic rebel of the Caucasus who fought the Tsarist conquest of Chechnya and Dagestan for 25 years in the mid-19th century, Basayev was a hero of the first Chechen war against the Russian army in 1994 before embracing a brand of extreme violence that put him beyond the reach of popular support.

His potential as an organiser and leader of men was spotted in 1991 when, as a young computer salesman and college dropout, he helped defend President Boris Yeltsin who was sheltering in the White House in Moscow from a Communist coup in his first tenuous days as Russian leader.

Later that year, Basayev, who had served as a fireman in the Soviet Army, became an enthusiastic fighter in the breakaway fringes of the USSR. He gained fame, and a reputation for daring, exhibitionist violence, by hijacking a Russian passenger jet and flying it to Turkey to raise awareness for the Chechen cause.

His skills were employed by the Russian Government, which enlisted him in with a band of Chechen rebels to fight the Georgian independence campaign in Abkhazia. But two years later he returned to Chechnya to join the personal bodyguard of Dzhokar Dudayev, the region's first separatist President.

When war broke out in 1994, he helped direct the defence of the capital, Grozny, and undermined the Russian invasion with roadside bombings and swift, lethal ambushes. Journalists who interviewed Basayev during the fighting identified him as a young, capable leader, with little trace of the brutality and certainly none of the Islamist rhetoric that was to define his later acts.

A Russian airstrike on Vedeno in 1995 that killed 11 members of Basayev's family is seen as a turning point in his life. Months later, he took 1,000 people hostage in a hospital in Buddyonovsk in southern Russia and more than 100 people died in a botched rescue attempt by Russian soldiers.

The Buddyonovsk attack was later compared to the Beslan school siege in September 2004 that gave Basayev global notoriety. But at the time, it made him one of the most popular figures in Chechen politics. The siege ended live on Russian television, with Basayev, who was later decorated by the Chechen Government, negotiating his safe return to Grozny with the then Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

At the end of the war in 1996, Basayev stood on the brink of mainstream politics, and ran against Aslan Maskhadov, the moderate father of modern Chechen separatism, in the region's presidential election. But he was soundly defeated and although named as Prime Minister, only served a single, six-month term, wearing a t-shirt to the office.

It was during the years that followed that Basayev, apparently frustrated by peace and politics, grew a long beard and adopted the language and funding of worldwide jihad. During the war he had met and befriended Ibn al-Khattab, a shadowy jihadi commander from Saudi Arabia who had fought in Afghanistan.

It was with Khattab in 1999 that Basayev launched the first violent raids against villages in Dagestan -- setting up Sharia courts to enact Islamic law and attacking barbers willing to shave men's beards. The violence prompted President Putin to begin the second Chechen war and led to a wave of Basayev-led kidnappings, beheadings and filmed attacks on Russian soldiers.

Wounded up to eight times by Russian forces -- and declared dead at least twice -- Basayev became the Kremlin's prime target. In 2002, he claimed responsibility for taking hundreds of people hostage at the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow, where 129 died in a rescue attempt after Russian security forces used a powerful, narcotic gas to subdue the kidnappers.

Two years later, he was blamed for the killing of the pro-Kremlin President of Chechnya and then had himself filmed leading a raid into neighbouring Ingushetia, where his forces killed 90 people and captured a Russian horde of ammunition. A similar raid in Kabardino-Balkariya last year cost the lives of 139 people.

But it was the first days of September 2004, when around 30 of Basayev's militants occupied Beslan's school number one, that brought the former fireman to the world's attention and ended any hopes of popular support. Although he was named Vice President of the Chechen rebel government just last week, the deaths of 331 civilians, mostly children, made him wanted by both sides.

In an interview with the American broadcaster, ABC, last year, Basayev accused the Russian Government of genocide but acknowledged his own crimes. "I admit, I'm a bad guy, a bandit, a terrorist," he said. "But what would you call them?... If they are the keepers of constitutional order, if they are anti-terrorists, then I spit on all these agreements and nice words."

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