MOSCOW -- Russia reported the arrest Wednesday of the prime suspect in the 1998 murder of three Britons and a New Zealander who had been setting up a telephone system in separatist Chechnya. Military officials said, "They had arrested a Chechen rebel leader, Khusein Idiyev, whom they identified as a lieutenant of feared separatist Warlord Arbi Barayev."

The officials claimed that Idiyev had confessed to beheading four men before his capture by Russian troops in Chechnya, they gave no other details.

The British Embassy was not immediately available for comment, although one of its spokesmen told Ria Novosti news agency his office had requested immediate official confirmation and other details from the Russian military.

The hostages -- Britons Peter Kennedy, Darren Hickey, and Rudolf Petschi, and New Zealand's Stanley Shaw -- were engineers working for Granger telecom, a British telephone company.

Their heads were found about 25 Miles (40 Km) south of the Chechen capital Grozny in December 1998, four weeks after they were Kidnapped, said AFP.