Kremlin's man heads for win in tense Chechen poll

A Moscow-backed policeman was set to become rebel Chechnya's president after a fraught election yesterday marked by a bomb blast in which only the attacker was killed.

Polls closed with turnout at almost 80 per cent of the more than a half a million Chechens registered to vote. Alu Alkhanov, benefiting from Kremlin backing and a publicity campaign that overshadowed his six little-known opponents, seemed sure of election to replace the assassinated Akhmad Kadyrov.

Many voters professed loyalty to the tall, moustachioed Alkhanov, but others doubted he would be able to stamp out rebellion and present Russian President Vladimir Putin with a pacified Chechnya after a decade of war.

The Kremlin-sponsored poll took place against the backdrop of heavy fighting in Chechnya and two plane crashes that killed at least 89 people elsewhere in Russia. With investigators saying traces of explosives had been found on both planes, many blame Chechen separatists for the air disasters.

A man identified as a wanted rebel was killed by his own bomb near a polling station in the capital, Grozny, an election official said.

A spokesman for the head of Chechnya's main rebel group, Akhmed Zakayev, said the election should not have been allowed to go ahead under such conditions of conflict.

"To talk about elections in today's Chechnya is as absurd as talking about elections in a Warsaw ghetto or a Stalin gulag," Zakayev, a spokesman for Chechnya's separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, said in a statement from London where he is based.

Chechnya's more than one million residents live in a region of the Caucasus ravaged by war between separatists and Russian forces.

Tens of thousands were killed on both sides in the first conflict from 1994 to 1996. Putin sent troops back into the mainly Muslim territory on Russia's southern fringes in 1999 to cement his image as a strong leader ahead of his own election.

But total victory has eluded Mr Putin, now in his second term, and the assassination of Kadyrov - Mr Putin's iron man in the region - by a bomb in May came as a heavy blow.

Mr Putin is now counting on the 47-year-old Alkhanov, already marked for death by separatist rebels who brand the election a farce.

Grozny, the war-shattered capital, was like a ghost town. Thick foliage has taken root in the ruins of wrecked buildings. The market was shut and the streets were deserted on Sunday.

Some 14,000 Chechen police were reported to be out on patrol alongside Russian forces. Security forces were dug into sandbagged emplacements or deployed strategically in buildings overlooking polling stations.