RUSSIA - Dec. 14 - Chechen Rebel Dies In Jail.

Salman Raduyev, a 35-year-old Chechen guerrilla who became infamous for seizing 2,000 hostages at a hospital in the south Dagestani town of Kizlyar in 1996, dies of an internal hemorrhage in a prison near Perm in the Urals. But officials did not say what caused the bleeding, except to insist that his death was due to natural causes. Deputy Justice Minister Yuri Kalinin said in a television interview: "I have already been asked today whether he was beaten, killed. But this is not even an issue". (Raduyev, long identified by his flowing red beard and fiery support of Islamic revolution, was one of the flashiest guerrilla commanders during Chechen separatists' first war for independence, from 1994 to 1996. When Russian troops captured him in March 2000, Moscow portrayed the arrest as a major blow to the leaders of the second Chechnya war, which had begun the previous autumn after Islamic militants moved from Chechnya into a neighbouring republic, Dagestan. But Raduyev played virtually no role in the second war in Chechnya, and he frequently feuded with other guerrilla commanders. His capture and later imprisonment on charges of murder, hostage-taking and terrorism appear to have had little effect on the war, now in its fourth year. It was Raduyev's forces who cast the most decisive and humiliating blow against the federal army during the first Chechen war, storming the Dagestani town of Kizlyar and seizing at least 2,000 - some reports said 3,400 - hostages. In what the hostages later called a brutal standoff, Raduyev threatened to execute the hostages one by one unless the Kremlin ended its efforts to crush the Chechen independence movement. After a bloody firefight, the government of Pres. Boris Yeltsin agreed to allow the rebels to return to Chechnya in buses with at least 100 hostages. When the hostages were not freed at the Chechnya border, Russian forces opened fire from the air - and destroyed the police escort for the guerrillas. The militants later fled to a tiny Dagestani village, Peryomayskoye. There, outnumbered 10 to one, they withstood a withering assault by Russian troops and then melted away, belying the Kremlin claims that the guerrillas had been surrounded. While Raduyev lost at least half his force during the raid, his escape underscored the weakness of the federal army, many of whose troops were left without food or heat by the end of the 10-day siege).