 Intelligence gathered by special services suggests that Al-Qaeda's representative in Chechnya Abu Havs [transliterated from the Russian] spent several years in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge training militants in camps and distributing funds among Chechen separatists. "In 1996, Osama bin Laden sent Abu Havs to Georgia as an Al-Qaeda representative. He told everyone his name was Amzhet and lived in the village of Tsuniban in the Pankisi Gorge," the newspaper Vremya Novostei reported on Friday. Havs remained in Georgia until 2002, and built a Wahhabite mosque and opened a hospital for militants wounded in Chechnya, the newspaper said. The Russian Federal Security Service has neither confirmed nor denied these reports. "We have been refraining from official comments on Abu Havs's operations in the Caucasus," an FSB spokesman told Interfax. |