RUSSIA: Long-used to dodging assassination attempts in a homeland where he was widely despised, Chechnya's president Mr Akhmad Kadyrov thought that his death would mean little in the chronic battle between Moscow and the region's separatist rebels.
"If I was gone, someone else would take my place," he said last week. "And that person would never allow those criminals to run Chechnya again."
Now Mr Kadyrov is dead, blown up yesterday in an extraordinarily audacious attack, and "those criminals" - the guerrillas who were once his allies - are celebrating the gruesome end of a man whom they derided as an "enemy of the people".
If confirmed as the work of rebels - and other theories are already emerging from Chechnya - then the explosion that killed Mr Kadyrov would be their most spectacular act of defiance since they seized Moscow's Dubrovka theatre in October 2002, along with 129 hostages.
For the Kremlin administration, Mr Kadyrov was the face - the bearded, usually scowling face - of their effort to divide and rule in the region, to co-opt a local leader to help pacify a people who have sporadically risen up against Moscow's rule for centuries.
For many Chechens, he was a turncoat who took Moscow's shilling and its carte blanche to run the province as he wished. International rights groups supported civilian accounts of kidnap, torture and murder carried out by Mr Kadyrov's men, and often by the shadowy security forces run by his thuggish son, Ramzan.
Few Chechens would have felt much pity for a tearful Ramzan yesterday, when Russian president Mr Vladimir Putin took him briefly by the hand as the television cameras rolled, to record their sorrow and their vows to avenge his father's death. Every Chechen family has grieved during a decade scarred by two wars of Moscow's making.
Mr Kadyrov was a former spiritual leader, who declared holy war against Russia in 1995, a year before the Kremlin withdrew its forces in humiliation after three years of fighting, and left the mountainous republic to run itself.
But the burly Chechen turned against his rebel comrades in 1999, accused them of adopting radical Islam, and sided with Moscow when it returned troops to the region that autumn.
Mr Putin made him Chechnya's acting leader in June 2000, and he was elected president last October, in a rigged vote that the Kremlin called proof of his popularity and of the stability in the region, but which rebels and international observers called a farce.
As Mr Kadyrov built up his personal power over four years, so grave rights abuses increased and rebel elements became radicalised. Suicide bombings are now a regular tactic, particularly using women dubbed "black widows" by the Russians.
Moscow calls them proof that Arab radicals have taken over in Chechnya, and call the Caucasus a flank of the US-led "war on terror". Most Chechens say they are the distraught wives, sisters and mothers of men killed or brutalised by Russian soldiers.
Yesterday's attack killed the Kremlin's man live on local television, in graphic pictures that were beamed around the world over the following hours.
Mr Kadyrov's death - under heavy guard, amid celebrations marking the defeat of Nazi Germany, just two days after Mr Putin was inaugurated again as president - was as humiliating for the Kremlin as it was terrifying for its allies in Chechnya.
The former KGB agent vowed to crush separatism when he came to power in 2000, and promised to protect Russia's territorial integrity in his speech on Friday.
But it will be hard to find someone with Mr Kadyrov's perceived selling points - a former Chechen rebel who supposedly saw the error of his ways and chose Moscow's path to peace - and all but impossible to convince candidates that they will be protected.
Mr Kadyrov's successor would also have to handle Ramzan and his personal army. It could be very difficult to rein in the hothead and his heavily armed men, now that his father is no longer around to control him and he is bent on revenge.
Several leading politicians called for Moscow to take direct control over Chechnya, until someone was found the fill the power vacuum left by Mr Kadyrov.
Amid all the official remorse over his death, an alternative theory has surfaced, as it usually does in Russia, and especially Chechnya.
Mr Kadyrov had ruffled many feathers in Moscow with loud demands to take full control of the region's oil-based economy and security forces. And many hard-liners in Russia's security services were angered by his suggestion that rebel chief Mr Aslan Maskhadov should receive an amnesty if he surrendered.
Such a move would have given Mr Kadyrov great kudos, and strengthened his case for taking full control in Chechnya and sidelining many Russian military men and officials who make lucrative careers out of the civil war in the Caucasus mountains.
Ramzan Kadyrov made his suspicions clear last week, when he complained that his attempts to broker Mr Maskhadov's surrender had been scuppered.
"His people came to me for a detailed discussion, and I put them up in two houses. It seemed that Maskhadov's future was already clear. But the federal secret service surrounded the houses on the next day. Three of Maskhadov's envoys were killed and four were wounded," Ramzan said.
"The operation we had thoroughly planned was thwarted. On whose order was this done? Who took Maskhadov away from me? It is not an idle question, as I co-ordinate every step I take with the regional headquarters for the anti-terrorist campaign. Somebody does not want Maskhadov to leave the separatists."
The bomb that killed his father exploded right under his seat in the VIP-section of the stadium. Experts think it was actually sealed in the concrete of the building, so foiling the teams of sniffer-dogs that patrolled the area right until the start of the Victory Day event. The attack demanded intimate knowledge of plans for the ceremony and meticulous planning and execution.
Perhaps the rebels managed it. They welcomed its outcome without claiming responsibility yesterday.
Perhaps someone else wanted Mr Kadyrov dead. Whoever killed him, amid the fog of conflicting theories, it is harder than ever to see a peaceful future for Chechnya.