Jamestown Foundation, 5 Feb 10: Insurgent violence has continued unabated in the North Caucasus this week, with five federal servicemen dying in a shootout with insurgents in Chechnya yesterday (February 4) and Russia’s security services again accusing Georgia of aiding militants in the North Caucasus. . .

. . . . On February 3, the head of the FSB directorate for Dagestan, Vyacheslav Shanshin, told Russia’s Vesti-24 state television channel that security forces in the republic had killed an Egyptian militant who was “one of the founders of the al-Qaeda network in the North Caucasus.” RIA Novosti quoted an unnamed FSB spokesman as saying that the 49-year-old Egyptian national, Makhmoud Mokhammed Shaaban, was killed in a shootout with police in Dagestan’s Botlikhsky district on February 2, and that a Dagestani militant and a police officer also died in the gun battle.

The FSB spokesman said that Shaaban, aka Seif Islam (the sword of Islam), had seen action in Afghanistan in the 1990’s, and “was also in Sudan, Somali, Libya and Georgia,” as well as arriving in Chechnya in 1992 “to take part in operations against federal forces.” The spokesman added that Shaaban had organized the North Caucasus branch of al-Qaeda with Saudi-born Islamic radical Ibn Al-Khattab, and that he had been behind a series of bombing attacks targeting railway tracks, electricity lines and energy pipelines on the instructions of Georgian secret services.

On February 4, a spokesman for Georgia’s Interior Ministry, Shota Utiashvili, denied the allegations that his country had assisted Shaaban. He called the charges “anti-Georgian propaganda” and said Georgia has nothing to do with the violence in Russia’s North Caucasus. . . .