Chechnya's nationalist leader, poet and writer. Zelimkhan was involved in talks with Boris Yeltsin during the shelling of Grozny in December 1994 but he failed to gain wide endorsement from the Chechen people. He became acting president of Chechnya after Dzhokhar Dudayev was blown up by Russian missile on 26 April 1996 but in 1997's presidential election he came a poor third. He espoused radical views, which were unpopular. Zelimkhan opened Chechen embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul during the reign of the Taliban. Zelimkhan started working as bricklayer when he was 17 but being ambitious self-promoted himself, by attaining education, into limelight. He published several collections of verse and short stories under the pseudonym Abdulmuslimovich. Most of his energies were devoted to the independence movement. Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev died after his car exploded in Doha, Qatar, where he was based as emissary and fund-raiser for the Chechen freedom fighters and, Russia and the USA claimed, the movement's link with al-Qaida. Zelimkhan, like almost all leading Chechen politicians, was born, after Stalin had exiled the entire Chechen nation beyond the Ural Mountains during the Second World War, at Vydrika in Kazakhstan.