An alleged “Russian” spy who was beheaded in a video released by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) was an orphan pressured into spying after being arrested with drugs, it has been reported. 
 
 Magomed Khasiev, 23, was beheaded by one of his own countrymen in a brutal execution video released by the extremist group late on Wednesday. 
 
 The video shows Mr Khasiev, seated and wearing an orange jump suit, explaining in detail how he was recruited by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor agency to the KGB, and infiltrated into Isil before the group’s internal ‘security service’ allegedly unmasked him. 
 
 It then cuts to a stony beach, where a Russian-speaking Isil member issues a direct challenge to Vladimir Putin and the Russian people before cutting Mr Khasiev’s head off with a knife . 
 
 While the filmed “confession” must be open to doubt, details of Mr Khasiev’s life have been confirmed by Russian journalists. 
 
 Born in Chelyabinsk, in Russia’s Ural Mountains, Mr Khasiev was orphaned at the age of nine and brought up by adoptive parents in Chechnya, Radio Svoboda reported on Thursday. 
 
 He later studied at a college in Maikop, the capital of the North Caucasus republic of Adygea, which neighbours Chechnya. 
 
 In 2013, he wrote on the Instagram page of Ramzan Kadyrov, the hardline president of Chechnya, asking for help moving to the republic. 
 
 According to Radio Svoboda’s investigation, he was recruited by the FSB after being caught transporting illegal drugs in February 2014. 
 
 In his confession video, Khasiev says he was recruited in July last year after police stopped and searched a bus he was travelling on. In the account in the video, he says the FSB officer interrogating him mentioned both drugs and his connections with Chechen citizens already in Syria. 
 
 After agreeing to infiltrate Isil, he says he was trained in Chechnya before flying to Istanbul in August 2014, where he linked up with a people-smuggler who got him across the border into Isil territory in Iraq. 
 
 Operating within the terrorist group, he sent information back to his handler “five times", providing information on about “six brothers”, including a group at a medical institute. 
 
 Russian media have speculated that he may have been referring to two students from Stavropol who were arrested in November last year. 
 
 Mr Khasiev’s executioner has not been identified, but he speaks native-level Russian without an accent, and in the video wears a paramilitary uniform apparently carefully chosen to distinguish him as a Russian or former Soviet citizen. 
 
 Addressing Mr Putin directly, the bearded man warned that the terror group would take revenge for Russia’s entry into the Syrian war. 
 
 Photo: AP 
 
 ”O people of Russia, you will once again dragged into an unwinnable war. You will not be safe,” the killer says. 
 
 “We will kill your children for each dead child here, and we will destroy your houses for each destroyed house here. Oh, mothers of Russia, hold on to your sons, otherwise they will face the same fate,” he continued, before murdering Mr Khasiev. 
 
 The killer’s camouflage fatigues are widely produced in Russia and were standard issue for separatists fighting in Ukraine, while the white and blue-stripe vest he wears is an iconic part of the uniform of Russian marines and paratroopers. 
 
 Both items are easy to acquire, and there is no suggestion that the man is a veteran of the Russian armed forces. 
 
 Photo: Getty Images 
 
 Russian security sources have cast doubt on the Isil video’s claims, saying if Mr Khasiev was really an intelligence asset, the group would have used him as a bargaining chip, instead of murdering him. 
 
 “If the militants had really found a spy, they undoubtedly would have used him as a negotiating pawn,” an unnamed security source told Interfax. “Most probably he had nothing to do with our intelligence.” 
 
 Mr Kadyrov confirmed that the victim was a Chechen and promised revenge. 
 
 "The Chechen people will remember this," he said, adding that the killers would be given "one way tickets to a better world". ||||| A prisoner who identified himself as Magomed Khasiev, a Russian national who grew up in the Chechnya region, speaks in this still image taken from an undated video in an unknown location. REUTERS/Social media via Reuters TV 
 
 (L-R) Minkail Temiev, Viktor Zyzin and Magomed Khasiev, pose for a picture in a park in the southern city of Maykop, Russia in this handout photo provided to Reuters by Viktor Zyzin. REUTERS/Viktor Zyzin/Handout via Reuters 
 
 MAYKOP/GVARDEYSKOYE, Russia In the video, a man in an orange jump suit kneels beside a lake in Syria and confesses in Russian to spying on Islamic State militants. Another Russian speaker, this one in camouflage fatigues, then uses a hunting knife to hack off the kneeling man's head. 
 
 When Islamic State posted this footage online on Dec. 2, it brought the distant Syria conflict home to ordinary Russians. Here, in high-definition video, appeared to be one young Russian killing another for reasons few people could understand. 
 
 It also opened up another mystery. 
 
 The prisoner and alleged spy in the video said his name was Magomed Khasiev, that he was from Russia's mainly Muslim region of Chechnya, and that he worked for Russian intelligence. 
 
 Pro-Kremlin Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov quickly denied Khasiev was a spy. 
 
 But interviews with more than a dozen people who knew Khasiev in Russia suggest the 23-year-old man had connections to both Muslim groups and Russian security and seemed to live a double life. 
 
 An ethnic Russian born to a non-Muslim family in Russia's industrial heartland, Khasiev spent his teenage years among Chechens who knew him as a devout Muslim and a fluent Chechen speaker. Some of his Chechen friends went off to fight for Islamist militants in the Middle East, and encouraged him to join them. 
 
 In his other life he associated with non-Muslims, had a friend in the police, and had a license from the Interior Ministry to work as a security guard, according to a former teacher, a friend, and staff of several security companies. For some purposes, including his work, Khasiev used the name he was given at birth: Yevgeny Yudin. 
 
 If his testimony on the video is to be believed, Khasiev ended up caught in the murky world between official Russian involvement in the conflict in Syria and the jihad that several thousand citizens of Russia and other former Soviet republics have joined. 
 
 Neither Russia's Federal Security Service – the intelligence agency Khasiev claimed he was working for – or Russia's Interior Ministry responded to requests for comment on the case. 
 
 ORPHANAGE 
 
 According to his file at an orphanage in Chechnya, Khasiev was raised for the first decade of his life by his mother, an ethnic Russian. When he was 10, she handed him to the orphanage for reasons the file does not make clear. Soon after, the documents show, his mother died of tuberculosis. 
 
 In the orphanage, Khasiev, or Yudin at that time, learned Chechen, gave himself the Muslim first name Magomed and converted to Islam. 
 
 The former head of the orphanage, Ruslan Yusupov, remembers Khasiev playing with his own children and grandchildren. "He was soft as a kitten. He loved attention and care so much." 
 
 After three years, Khasiev was adopted by a Chechen family and took the last name of his adoptive mother Markha Khasieva. But she returned him to the orphanage a year later because of tensions between her and other relatives. Khasieva told Reuters she had nevertheless stayed in touch with the boy and cared for him. 
 
 In 2008, Russia's then Interior Minister, Rashid Nurgaliev, visited the orphanage to talk to potential new recruits for the Suvorov academy, an new elite military school. 
 
 According to orphanage staff, Khasiev, then 16, was keen to enroll but was rejected as too old. His best friend at the orphanage, Minkail Temiev, did qualify. 
 
 TRUE CHECHEN? 
 
 Khasiev was sent to a college in Maykop, capital of the predominantly Muslim Russian region of Adygeya, some 500 km (310 miles) from the Chechen capital Grozny. 
 
 There, according to friends and family, Khasiev moved in two sets of social circles. 
 
 In one, he maintained his Chechen identity and stayed in touch with his adoptive family and old friends, including Temiev. According to orphanage staff, Temiev in fact followed Khasiev to Maykop. 
 
 At college, Khasiev was registered by his Russian name. But he told teachers he wanted to be called Magomed. "At first, he corrected his teachers," his supervisor Tatiana Maystrevskaya recalled. "I told him: Once you change your documents, I will call you Magomed. He didn't object to that." 
 
 Acquaintances outside college, many of them Chechens, always knew him as Magomed. "He wasn't any different from us, he spoke pure Chechen. Many people didn't even know he was Russian," said one of Khasiev's Chechen friends. 
 
 Khasiev eventually changed his name officially to Magomed Khasiev by applying for a new passport, according to Viktor Zyzin, a close friend and an ethnic Russian. 
 
 But despite his insistence on using a Muslim name, Khasiev did not appear to be a Chechen nationalist or radical, Zyzin said. A 2011 posting on Khasiev's account on Vkontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, shows him posing next to a poster of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. The Chechen leader helped the Kremlin defeat a Muslim insurgency in the North Caucasus and is considered by Muslim militants to be an infidel. 
 
 And Khasiev had plenty of non-Muslim friends, including Zyzin and an ethnic Armenian called Grant. 
 
 In the video of his beheading, Khasiev describes Grant as an old acquaintance and the conduit to Russian special services through which he passed the intelligence he collected on Islamic State militants. 
 
 A Chechen friend of Khasiev told Reuters Grant served in the police. Two other people who knew Khasiev, including Zyzin, said they had met Grant but did not know where he worked. 
 
 Reuters has not been able to establish Grant's family name or other details about him. Officers in the regional police department of Adygea and the city police of Maykop said nobody of that name worked for them. The Interior Ministry in Moscow did not reply to a request for comment. 
 
 RADICAL FRIEND? 
 
 At the end of 2013, Khasiev was hired by Sherif M, a security company in Maykop. According to Anzor Takhumov, head of a local security guard school, Khasiev had applied for an Interior Ministry license to work as a guard a few years earlier using the name Yudin. That was also the name he used to get his job. 
 
 Just a few months after he began working, Zyzin said, Khasiev sold an apartment he had bought under a Russian government scheme designed to help orphans. 
 
 It is not clear how he ended up in Islamic State territory in Syria, but members of Khasiev's adoptive family in Chechnya suspect his old friend Temiev may have played a role. 
 
 They believe Temiev had become radicalized. Markha Khasieva said her adoptive son had told her that Temiev had tried to recruit him to join Islamist fighters, but that Khasiev had rejected the offer. She remembers Temiev showing up at a funeral wearing a long beard, a style often associated with followers of hardline Islam. Family members joked that he looked like Karl Marx. 
 
 According to people who knew him, Khasiev enjoyed drinking and dating girls and showed no sign of Islamist sympathies. "He did not have any extremist views," said Ruslan, Markha Khasieva's nephew. 
 
 Nevertheless, Khasiev left Russia at some point last year. His adoptive family in Chechnya had little idea where he had gone. "We thought he was off working somewhere," said Malika Khasieva, his adoptive aunt. 
 
 Khasiev did keep in touch with his Russian friend Viktor Zyzin, sending him messages from the outskirts of Kobani, a Syrian town near the border with Turkey that was the center of a battle between Islamic State and Kurdish forces. 
 
 Zyzin said he believed his friend went there to follow Temiev. But he quickly discovered that Temiev had been killed, Zyzin said, citing messages Khasiev had sent him. 
 
 In his messages, Khasiev referred to his fellow fighters as "brothers" and started using common Islamic expressions more and more often. Zyzin said his friend told him "he simply collected dead bodies ... He told me he was tired of picking up pieces." 
 
 The last message from Khasiev was in February. Zyzin had asked his friend to come home. 
 
 "He said that he may come to visit. But at the end he wrote that he got tired. He sent voice messages. Back then I realized already, that he would not come back. There is simply no way back from there." 
 
 (Edited by Christian Lowe and Simon Robinson)
– In the minutes before his execution by an ISIS militant in Syria, Chechen Magomed Khasiev confessed to being a spy recruited by Russian intelligence agency Federal Security Service—something Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov quickly denied. But many people who knew the 23-year-old say he "seemed to live a double life," per Reuters, with connections to Muslim groups as well as Russian security. Born Yevgeny Yudin to a non-Muslim family in Chechnya, Khasiev lived for a time in an orphanage. "He was soft as a kitten," a former orphanage head says. He was later adopted by a Chechen family and took the family name, becoming Magomed Khasiev (he had earlier given himself the Muslim first name). Sources say he was friends with a cop, associated with non-Muslims, and did not appear to be a radical. Others, however, say Khasiev was a devout Muslim whose best friend at the orphanage, Minkail Temiev, tried to convince him to fight for Islamist militants. When Temiev left the orphanage to enroll at an elite military school, friends say Khasiev kept in touch. In 2014, Khasiev sold his apartment and traveled to the Syrian town of Kobani on the border with Turkey. One report suggested he was caught with illegal drugs in February 2014 and then pressured into spying by the FSS, per the Telegraph. But a friend who received messages from Khasiev says he went to Syria to find Temiev, who Khasiev's adoptive family believed had become radicalized. Khasiev told the friend he found Temiev was dead, so he "simply collected dead bodies" with other fighters, whom he called "brothers." In his execution video posted Dec. 2, Khasiev says he passed intelligence on ISIS to Russian authorities through an old acquaintance, an ethnic Armenian named Grant. A friend of Khasiev's says Grant worked for the police. Little else about him is known.