Police on Sunday killed an Arab who Russian security officials said commanded foreign mercenaries in Chechnya and was al-Qaeda’s top emissary in the troubled North Caucasus.

Abu Khavs was killed in a four-hour gunbattle with police in the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt, not far from the Chechen border, along with four other militants, said Mikhail Merkulov, deputy director for the Dagestani branch of the Federal Security Service, or FSB.

Merkulov called Abu Khavs “a foreign mercenary of Jordanian origin” who was the main al-Qaeda contact for the North Caucasus.

“We have information that the operations conducted in Chechnya that were aimed at counteracting federal actions were planned and carried out with the direct participation of the terrorist Abu Khavs,” he said in comments broadcast on state-run television. He said Abu Khavs also planned “bandit operations” in Dagestan.

Footage broadcast by state-run television showed a house apparently ravaged by gunfire, along with the bodies of at least five of the alleged militants.

One FSB officer was wounded in the operation, said Irina Volkova, a spokeswoman for the service.

In Moscow, the FSB’s central headquarters said in a statement that Abu Khavs’ presence in Dagestan signaled that he may have been seeking to flee Russia altogether, and called his death a “telling psychological blow to all the fighters remaining in the North Caucasus mountains.”

At least one rebel-linked Web site, daymonk.org, said five militants had been killed in a battle in Khasavyurt, but made no mention of Abu Khavs.

According to Russian security officials, Abu Khavs, whose name has also been spelled Havs or Hafs, was a commander of foreign mercenaries who once were active participants in Chechnya.

As large-scale fighting has died down in Chechnya, the number of foreigners fighting there has dropped. In recent years, violence in the Russian region has mainly taken the form of hit-and-run attacks against federal forces and local allied paramilitaries.

Russian forces have killed or captured a number of top Chechen rebel leaders in recent years, including the notorious warlord Shamil Basayev and Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, who was the one-time president of the separatists’ self-declared government.

Russian security officials say Abu Khavs took over as al-Qaeda’s top emissary in Chechnya in 2004 after the death of Saudi-born rebel chief Abu Walid.

In an interview with a Turkish newspaper that was posted on the rebel-allied Web site Kavkaz Center, Khavs maintained that separatist fighters were enjoying new successes in their war against Russian forces, and he asserted that few fighters had responded to the amnesty that was offered by federal officials earlier this year.

“The mere fact that the Russian authority has taken such an action testifies to the strength of the Chechen Resistance, and weakness and feebleness of the Russian army,” he said according to the interview, dated Nov. 12. “All Chechen fighters have responded to the amnesty by intensifying the struggle.”

The origin of Khavs’ alias is unclear. One of several independent militias now operating in Iraq is called the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade — named after former Osama bin Laden lieutenant Mohammed Atef, who used the nom de guerre Abu Hafs. Atef was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001.

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