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She took part in the negotiations for Nord-Ost, the 2002 hostage crisis at a Moscow theatre, after the Chechen rebels specifically requested her.

"They were strangers, I can't identify their identity or language, but they seemed to be Uzbek or Chechen," Mr Fares told me by phone.

The Azerbaijan Airlines plane had been en route from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to the Chechen capital of Grozny on 25 December when it is thought to have come under fire.

Troops under the command of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov were embroiled in the war from the earliest days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, with its forces implicated in many atrocities against Ukrainian civilians.

The head of Russia's civil aviation agency said on Friday that the situation in the Chechen capital was "very complicated" and that a closed-skies protocol had been put in place.