[8] Despite his aura, journalist Tom de Waal described him as "almost unassuming in the flesh", being "of medium height, with a bushy beard and high forehead worthy of a Moscow intellectual, and a quiet voice.

Forensic evidence suggests that his death was caused when a landmine he was examining exploded, but Russian officials have also claimed that one of the Kamaz trucks used was booby-trapped and detonated to destroy the arms shipment, also killing Basayev.

[12] The Basayevs, along with most of the rest of the Chechen population, had been deported to Kazakhstan during World War II in an act of ethnic cleansing on the orders of the NKVD leader Lavrenti Beria.

[15] A fourth secret wife, Elina Ersenoyeva, was apparently forced to marry Basayev under threat of her two brothers' lives, and subsequently hid the identity of her husband from her friends and family.

Basayev, Lom-Ali Chachayev, and the group's leader, Said-Ali Satuyev, a former airline pilot suffering from schizophrenia,[citation needed] hijacked an Aeroflot Tu-154 plane, en route from Mineralnye Vody in Russia to Ankara on 9 November 1991, and threatened to blow up the aircraft unless the state of emergency was lifted.

According to Azeri Colonel Azer Rustamov, in 1992, "hundreds of Chechen volunteers rendered us invaluable help in these battles led by Shamil Basayev and Salman Raduyev."

"[26] In a July 2020 interview, the former Russian Federal Security Service chief Sergei Stepashin admitted that Basayev cooperated with military intelligence while fighting against Georgian government in Abkhazia.

[36] Having already been noticed in Afghanistan, where he fought as a young man, and then in Abkhazia in Georgia, Basayev would further attract the attention of Pakistan's premier intelligence agency, the ISI: under Pakistani command, and after meeting many powerful personalities of the army, including the DG ISI Javed Ashraf Qazi, he would be one of the 1,500-strong Afghan mujahideen contingent which fought the Armenians during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and in April 1994, the ISI would eventually arrange "a refresher course for Basayev and some of his NCOs in guerrilla warfare and Islamic learning in the Amir Munawid Camp in Khost province in Afghanistan", with Basayev also having further specialized training in Pakistan proper, in cities like Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Muridke, near Lahore.

Ultimately, hundreds of Chechens would be trained in Khost, under the ISI as well as the Pakistan-based Islamist outfit Harkat-ul-Ansar, and one of its commanders, Abu Abdullah Jaffa, once in Pakistan's Northern Light Infantry, would work closely with Basayev over the years, as for instance he's supposed to be the one who planned the invasion of Dagestan.

Basayev's own account of his activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan is as such, as given in a September 2003 interview to The Globe and Mail:I was interested in the Afghan experience on the defence engineering constructions, air defense system and mine-explosive works.

I sold at home some captured weaponry, seized in June from Labazanov’s band in then Groznyi, took also some money from my acquaintances and transported the first group of 12 people to Afghanistan.

Basayev stepped down from his military position in December 1996 to run for president in Chechnya's second (and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria's first and only ever internationally monitored) presidential elections.

As Chechnya collapsed into chaos, Basayev's reputation began to plummet as he and others were accused of corruption and involvement in kidnapping; his alliance with Khattab also alienated many Chechens.

"[43] According to Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko's book Death of a Dissident, Kremlin-critic Boris Berezovsky said that he had a conversation with the Chechen Islamist leader Movladi Udugov in 1999, six months before the beginning of fighting in Dagestan.

[45] Udugov proposed to start the Dagestan war to provoke the Russian response, topple the Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and establish new Islamic republic of Basayev-Udugov that would be friendly to Russia.

Berezovsky asserted that he refused the offer, but "Udugov and Basayev conspired with Stepashin and Putin to provoke a war to topple Maskhadov ... but the agreement was for the Russian army to stop at the Terek River.

[56][57][58][59] Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute said "Basayev managed to radically change the world's perception of the Chechen cause, from that of a small nation resisting victimization by Russian imperialism into another outpost of the global jihad.

In the process, he also significantly modified the very nature of Islam in Chechnya and Northern Caucasus, from a traditional mix of syncretism and Sufism into one strongly influenced by Wahhabism and Salafism—especially among the youth.

[63] On 2 June 2001, it was reported General Gennady Troshev, then-commander-in-chief of Russian forces in Chechnya, had offered a bounty of one million dollars to anyone who would bring him the head of Basayev.

Shamil's younger brother, Shirvani, was reported killed by the Russians in 2000, but is, according to numerous accounts, actually living in exile in Turkey where he is involved in coordination of the activities of the diaspora.

[citation needed] The answer to who was behind the hostage taking, however, is not so clear – some dissidents claim, including Alexander Litvinenko, was that the FSB was behind the Moscow theater incident.

That explosion killed at least six people and wounded nearly 60, including the top Russian military commander in Chechnya, who lost his leg; Basayev called it a "small but important victory".

Even though Basayev had a $10 million bounty on his head, he gave an interview to Russian journalist Andrei Babitsky in which he described himself as "a bad guy, a bandit, a terrorist ... but what would you call them?

[citation needed] In March 2006, Prime Minister of Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, claimed that upwards of 3,000 police officers were hunting for Basayev in the southern mountains.

[83] According to the Interior Ministry and Prosecutor of Ingushetia, a group of three cars and two KAMAZ trucks (one pulling the other by a rope) gathered at the spot of an unfinished estate on the outskirts of the village in the early morning hours of 10 July.

[84] It is believed that the partially completed estate, which contained empty new buildings, was being used as an insurgent reception and distribution point for large quantities of weapons purchased from abroad.

[83][85][86] Interfax, quoting Ingush Deputy Prime Minister Bashir Aushev, reported that the explosion was a result of a truck bomb detonated next to the convoy by Russian agents.

[87] According to a Russian edition of Newsweek,[88] Basayev's death was a result of an FSB operation, whose primary aim was to prevent a planned terrorist attack in Chechnya or Ingushetia the days before the G8 summit in St Petersburg.

The pro-Chechen separatist Imkander organization held a press conference claiming that Turkish investigators believed that Makhauri had prepared the explosives laden truck that killed Basayev.

He wanted to draw benefits to the Mujahideen from this book and decided to "rewrite most of it, remove some excesses and strengthen all of it with verses (ayats), hadiths and stories from the lives of the disciples."