Hostage leader is warlord's nephew

The 23-year-old leader of the Moscow hostage-takers is the nephew of a Chechen warlord reportedly paid £20m by Osama bin Laden to execute four engineers.

Movsar Barayev’s uncle Arbi led an Islamic gang that kidnapped the three telecoms engineers and a colleague in Chechnya in October 1998.

Arbi earned a reputation for pathological cruelty before his death, and Mosvar, who has more than 600 hostages at his mercy, appears to exhibit the same ruthlessness.

According to the Russian army, Mosvar recently murdered another local rebel leader.

“Movsar Barayev is ready to kill anybody, including respected field commanders, for a large sum of money,” a member of the pro-Moscow Chechen administration said.

Movsar was the only rebel not to wear a mask while being filmed by cameramen allowed into the Moscow theatre.

Dressed in a new camouflage uniform and black woolly hat, he cradled a Kalashnikov assault rifle in his lap.

He has taken command of the fighters led by his uncle who kidnapped Peter Kennedy, 46, Darren Hickey, 27, Rudi Petschi, 42, and 58-year-old New Zealander Stanley Shaw as they installed a new telephone system in the breakaway province.

They were savagely beaten and beheaded in a disused factory near the capital Grozny two months later.

The deaths were blamed on a bungled rescue bid at the time, but one of Barayev’s Russian hostages has told a different story.

Abdurakhman Adukhov said he asked his captor why he personally killed the engineers.

He was told that the warlord hoped to receive more money if he killed them than if he freed them.

Barayev was negotiating a ransom with the men’s British employers.

He told Adukhov that by killing them, he stood to receive “not $10m but $30m”. The money would be paid by “Arab friends”.

Barayev reportedly said: “We are waging holy war. And we are involved in big politics. We ourselves will answer for everything before Allah.”

Bin Laden paid vast sums to Islamic extremists in Chechnya to help them spread fundamentalism through the region, intelligence sources have said.