The explosion also killed Ali Taziyev, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, citing the Federal Security Service. Taziyev was reportedly a former Ingush policeman who had taken part in the Beslan attack and was implicated in police killings in Ingushetia.

Basayev was the most notorious of the Chechen warlords, eluding Russian forces despite Kremlin vows to hunt him down and an offer of a reward and plastic surgery to anyone providing information leading to his death.

Basayev inflicted misery even before the Soviet Union's demise, starting with the hijacking of an airliner in 1991, a plot aimed at attracting attention to the Chechen separatist cause.

He went on to terrorize Russia with cunning and savage attacks that observed no limits, targeting hospitals, a theater and, in his most infamous plot, schoolchildren in Beslan.

The September 2004 attack on the Beslan school shocked Russia and divided the rebel movement because civilians, including women and children, were taken hostage.

The June 1995 attack on a hospital in the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, in which some 1,000 people were taken hostage and about 100 killed, was Basayev's first major terror attack. Dozens more were killed when Russian troops unsuccessfully stormed the hospital.

His decade-long record of slaying both civilians and soldiers reflected fanatical determination, a ferocity Russia long claimed was bolstered by help from international terror networks like al-Qaida. Washington declared Basayev a terrorist and a threat to the United States.

Chechnya's Moscow-backed Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, whose father was killed on Basayev's orders, according to the late warlord, said his only regret was not having killed Basayev himself.

"We are grateful to those who killed Basayev, but he was my personal enemy and I had promised to kill him," Kadyrov said.