MOSCOW - Relatives of Aslan Maskhadov, slain rebel leader in the Russian republic of Chechnya, will not be allowed to bury him because he is considered a major "terrorist," the Moscow state attorney's department said Wednesday.
"The law in force does not permit bodies of killed terrorists to be returned to their relatives for burial," Interfax news agency quoted Russian Deputy Attorney General Nikolai Shepel as saying.
Maskhadov was killed Tuesday in a bunker under a building in a Chechen village during a special operation led by elite Russian government forces fighting separatist rebels.
He had been blamed by the Russian government for numerous attacks on both military targets and civilians, including the Beslan school massacre last autumn and an October 2002 mass hostage-taking at a theatre in Moscow.
He denied taking part in either attack.
The deputy attorney-general said procedures for identifying the body, being kept at Russian army headquarters at Khankala near the Chechen capital Grozny, would take at least two weeks.
A spokesman for federal forces in Northern Caucasus said "the identification in which Maskhadov and persons who knew him well would participate does not require a complicated expertise, since the body is visually identifiable."
Officials of the state attorney's department were set Wednesday in Khankala to start interviewing three men take prisoner in the operation in which Maskhadov was killed.
One is said to be the owner of a house in whose cellar Maskhadov was holed up at the time, and the two others were his bodyguards.
Together with Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev, Maskhadov was one of Russia's two most wanted men and his death was described by Russian authorities as a major success in efforts that have so far lasted for a decade to subdue the armed rebellion in the southern Russian republic.
03/09/2005 12:11 GMT