The former head of one of the Russian-backed security forces in Chechnya was fatally shot in Moscow on Saturday by law enforcement officers who were trying to detain him on suspicion of abductions and killings.

Movladi Baisarov headed a force that provided security for Chechnya‘s first pro-Moscow president, Akhmad Kadyrov, who was assassinated in 2004, but had been on increasingly bad terms with Kadyrov‘s son Ramzan, the region‘s powerful prime minister. Baisarov‘s force had reportedly worked before for the separatist Chechen leadership in the late 1990s.

Baisarov‘s history reflects the volatile web of shifting allegiances and rivalries that contribute to persistent violence and tension in Chechnya, the site of two wars in the past 12 years pitting separatist rebels against Russian forces and their Chechen allies.

According to the weekly newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, Baisarov‘s force in recent years was under the control of the Federal Security Service, which is the main successor of the KGB and was formerly headed by President Vladimir Putin .

Major fighting has died down in Chechnya since the second war started in 1999 and the separatists were driven from power, but the mostly Muslim region is plagued by rebel attacks as well as violence blamed on federal troops and forces of the Moscow-backed Chechen government, many of them under Ramzan Kadyrov‘s control and many including former rebel fighters.

Also Saturday, homemade bombs exploded in two oil wells in Chechnya, and a third device was found and defused in another well in what authorities said they suspected was a rebel attack.

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