On 18 August 2006, Umarov was falsely announced to have surrendered at the Gudermes residence of Ramzan Kadyrov, the Russian-backed leader of Chechnya, under a Russian amnesty provision enacted after Basayev's death. However, Russian authorities later reversed it to a claim of surrender of Umarov's "younger brother and former head of bodyguards". Umarov maintained he has no younger brother and the later reports identified the alleged surrenderee as Doku's older brother, Akhmad, instead. Chechen separatists said that the older Umarov had disappeared two years before when he supposedly gave up and called it "a PR stunt". Umarov previously called the amnesty as ""a hopeless attempt by the Kremlin regime to shroud the real situation in lies.""