After being accused of involvement in the October 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis, Yandarbiyev was placed on Interpol's most wanted list and Russia made the first of several requests for extradition in February 2003, citing Yandarbiyev as a major international terrorist and financier of the al-Qaeda-backed Chechen resistance. In June 2003, his name was consequently added to the United Nations Security Council Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee's blacklist of al-Qaeda-related suspects. Yandarbiyev played a key role in directing funding from foundations in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf in order to support a radical Chechen faction dubbed the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment, a militant group responsible for the Moscow theater hostage crisis. In January 2004 he was interviewed extensively in Qatar for the BBC Four documentary "The Smell of Paradise", where the film-makers called him the "spiritual leader of the Chechens and a poet on the road to jihad."