The suspected mastermind of deadly attacks in Russia's Ingushetia region, including a bid to assassinate its leader, has been killed after a shootout with Russian forces, officials said on Saturday. Rustam Dzortov was suspected of planning the June 22 car bomb attack that badly wounded Ingushetia's president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and an August 17 bombing on its police headquarters that killed over 20.
Also known by his nom-de-guerre Abdul Ali, Dzortov's body was found Saturday after a shootout between militants and security forces on Friday that left two other militants dead, local security sources told Russian news agencies. "Two militants were killed in the shootout. The third managed to hide.
On Saturday his body was found not for from the scene of the clash," a spokesman for the Federal Security Service (FSB) told Russian news agencies. It was not clear how Dzortov died but the ITAR-TASS news agency said he was "found with a grenade in his hand". The chief ideologue behind the August 17 bombing on the police headquarters in Ingushetia's main city Nazran was Doku Umarov, the head of Chechnya's rebels, an official told the RIA Novosti news agency.