By Matt Bivens
STAFF WRITER
Senior Chechen commanders announced a successor Wednesday for rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudayev, who they said had been buried in a rural cemetery in southern Chechnya, following reports of his death in a weekend rocket attack.
Field commander Shamil Basayev, the leader of last June's hostage-taking raid on Budyonnovsk, said in a television broadcast from a secret facility that Vice President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev had succeeded Dudayev and that the republic would observe three days of mourning for the fallen rebel leader, Interfax reported.
After a day of conflicting reports about Dudayev's fate, Basayev said the rebel leader had been killed Sunday evening in a Russian rocket attack on the outskirts of the village of Gekhi-Chu, 35 kilometers southeast of Grozny.
But the top Russian military commander in Chechnya, General Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, told Itar-Tass that Dudayev had probably been killed by his own people and not by the Russian military.
"Federal forces had nothing to do with the death of Dzhokhar Dudayev," Tikhomirov told Itar-Tass. "Neither aviation nor the artillery of our troops conducted combat actions in the area of Gekhi-Chu on the night from April 21 to 22."
His statements were disputed by an anonymous source in the Interior Ministry, who told Itar-Tass that Russian forces bombed Gekhi-Chu and other suspected rebel bases over the weekend in a quest for revenge for the ambush of a Russian convoy last week in which Chechens killed as many as 95 Russian soldiers.
Interfax quoted Russian sources in Grozny as saying that Dudayev had been killed by an air-to-surface missile, guided by signals from the rebel leader's satellite telephone. Four similar attempts along these lines had failed, the agency said.
In the village of Shalazhi, where he was participating in a post-burial funeral ceremony at the home of one of Dudayev's cousins, Yandarbiyev told Itar-Tass that Dudayev had been buried by his close family in a village cemetery, but he would not say precisely where.
Dudayev's mother is buried in Shalazhi, Itar-Tass reported. The Itar-Tass correspondent wrote that the post-burial ceremony and "the statements of participants in it could leave no doubt that Dzhokhar Dudayev was truly dead."
Yandarbiyev, who many analysts believe will only hold the leadership post temporarily, told Itar-Tass that Dudayev was struck by a piece of shrapnel in the back of the head and died in the arms of his bodyguard.
The new president said that before Dudayev died he urged his men "not to quit the work begun and to see it through to the end," a reference to the drive for Chechen independence.
Yandarbiyev and Basayev were among Dudayev's closest associates. Both shared Dudayev's hardline views on Chechen independence. Basayev, an influential and flamboyant military leader, earned international notoriety for the Budyonnovsk raid. His band negotiated a safe passage back to Chechnya after that raid into southern Russia, in which more than 120 people were killed and hundreds were held hostage.
Dudayev's Moscow representative, Vagap Tutakov, had denied reports Tuesday of Dudayev's death, but Wednesday changed his position, saying Dudayev was certainly dead.
"Supporters of the president of [Chechnya] have vowed to avenge his death," Tutakov told Interfax.
As part of a much-publicized peace initiative unveiled late last month, President Boris Yeltsin ordered a halt to all offensive military operations, except for those aimed at countering impending terrorist attacks.
But military commanders in the field have apparently ignored that order.
In the weeks following the peace plan announcement, there were unofficial reports of aerial bombings, including of villages near Gekhi-Chu. Defense Minister Pavel Grachev announced last week to the State Duma that he had on his own initiative withheld Yeltsin's decree from the troops for days, freeing them instead to use artillery shelling and airstrikes.
Dudayev's death was first reported Tuesday by Itar-Tass, which cited a statement from "the government of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeriy" delivered by Khozh-Akhmed Yarikhanov, the man who headed Dudayev's negotiating team at peace talks in 1995. "Dudayev has been killed," Yarikhanov told Itar-Tass. "I have personally seen Dudayev's corpse."
The reports led evening television bulletins across the country.
The moment that statement was made public, soldiers guarding the streets of Grozny, the captured Chechen capital, fired their guns in the air in celebration, Itar-Tass reported.
But Russian officials seemed caught by surprise, and Wednesday they were still trying to confirm Dudayev's death. Interfax quoted a lone, anonymous top official in the Russian military as saying that Dudayev's death had been confirmed by "our network of agents."
Izvestia reported that Yeltsin, in Beijing, was receiving regular reports "but none confirming the death" from the military, the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the FSB security service.