The hostage crisis split the Chechens, with Salman Raduyev denounced by top Chechen rebel leaders. Polish fighter Mirosław Kuleba (Mehmed Borz) met Raduyev two months after the crisis, and believed that the latter may have intended to ignite a broader civil war in Dagestan. Kuleba felt that Raduyev tried to disguise in conversation that capturing a hospital and taking hostages had been planned and was not a desperate measure. In March 1996, Raduyev was shot in the head (in what some reports described as an ambush by rival guerrillas), and reportedly killed. However, he resurfaced after Dzhokhar Dudayev's death with his shattered head reconstructed with metal plates, and after the war became a seemingly mentally-unstable leader of an unruly private militia called General Dudayev's Army.