IF there is a single word that strikes fear and hatred into the hearts of Russians it is the surname Khattab. This is the name of the man who most Russians feel is behind the spate of bombings which have killed up to 300 people in Moscow and elsewhere in little over two weeks.

Khattab uses no first name. He fights in Dagestan alongside Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev in a campaign to run the Russian region into an Islamic state. Few people know anything about him. He sometimes calls himself Khattab the Jordanian though he is generally believed to come from a wealthy Saudi Arabian family. He is believed to be in his late 20s or early 30s.

After Russian forces bombed targets in Chechnya across the border from Dagestan, Khattab was quoted as saying: "The Mujahideen of Dagestan will carry out reprisals in various places across Russia." On the following day 64 people died with a bomb destroyed an apartment block in Buinaksk near the front line in Dagestan.

Since then 92 people have died in the bombing of a building in Guryanova Street in Moscow, 120 in Kashirskoye Chausee also in the Russian capital and 17 in the town of Volgadonsk near Rostov-on-Don in the south of the country.

Khattab first fought the Russians in Afghanistan. He then fought in the Islamist opposition to the Tajik government in Dushanbe before moving to Chechnya to fight the Russians again. One acquaintance, the human rights worker, Mr Andrei Mironov, who met Khattab during the Chechen war described him as a person of extreme fundamentalist beliefs. Many of the Chechen fighters against Russia, for example, were women but Khattab refused to speak to them directly.

According to the American expert on terrorism, Mr Yossef Bodansky, Khattab has been involved in attacks on French and Israeli targets. In Chechnya itself he appears to be almost as unpopular as he is in Russia and a number of attempts have been made on his life there.