Barayev and his group, based around the town of Urus-Martan, were linked to a series of high-profile crimes including the notorious murder of six foreign Red Cross employees shot dead in the hospital of Novye Atagi in September 1996, as well as the kidnappings of Yelena Masyuk, a Russian NTV journalist and personal friend of Maskhadov, and Valenti Vlasov, Boris Yeltsin's envoy to Chechnya.