.Kremlin hit squad 'assassinate Chechen Islamist in Istanbul'
The triple murder was carried out by a lone gunman in less than thirty seconds using a 9mm pistol fitted with a silencer. It brought the number of Chechens assassinated in the Turkish city in the last four years to at least six.
The gunman pumped eleven bullets into the three men in a busy Istanbul street before speeding off in a black getaway car.
One of the murdered men, 33-year-old Berg-Haj Musayev, was said to be close to Doku Umarov, an Islamist terrorist leader who is Russia's most wanted man. The other two were said to be his bodyguards.
It was Umarov who claimed responsibility for the January suicide bombing of Moscow's busy Domodedovo airport, an atrocity that left 37 people dead.
Musayev's widow Sehida said she was sure the Russian secret service was behind her husband's murder, a view echoed by Murat Ozer, head of a Chechen diaspora group in Istanbul.
"Russian intelligence, which previously brutally killed Chechen commanders in Turkey, has added another chapter to the massacres with these murders carried out in the middle of Istanbul," he said.
Turkish media said a manhunt was underway for the suspected killer, a 55-year-old Russian national it named as Alexander Zharkov.
Acting on a tip-off, Turkish Special Forces were reported to have stormed the Russian man's hotel room three days after the killings but to have missed him by a matter of minutes. They reportedly found the murder weapon, a passport, binoculars and a night vision scope however.
He is said to have slipped into the country earlier this month posing as a tourist. His passport showed he had also been in Istanbul in February 2009 when another Chechen man was shot dead.
Turkey is home to many Chechen refugees who fled the region's two brutal wars with Moscow including Vakha Umarov, the brother of Russia's most wanted man, and much of his notorious brother's family.
Russia's daily Izvestia newspaper quoted security service sources as saying that one of the murdered Chechen men was linked to the Moscow airport blast in January. Maxim Shevchenko, a Chechnya expert in the Public Palace, a Kremlin advisory body, said he saw no problem with such people being bumped off by the Kremlin. "If the murdered men really were involved in the suicide bombing then what has happened is a normal occurrence in a war," he said. "After all, they declared war on the Russian state so it is logical that in response our special services have a group of liquidators."
Other Chechens who have fallen out with the Kremlin or its proxies in recent years have been murdered in Dubai, Qatar, and Vienna, while Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who sympathised with Chechen separatists, was famously poisoned in London in 2006.
Telegraph
The gunman pumped eleven bullets into the three men in a busy Istanbul street before speeding off in a black getaway car.
One of the murdered men, 33-year-old Berg-Haj Musayev, was said to be close to Doku Umarov, an Islamist terrorist leader who is Russia's most wanted man. The other two were said to be his bodyguards.
It was Umarov who claimed responsibility for the January suicide bombing of Moscow's busy Domodedovo airport, an atrocity that left 37 people dead.
Musayev's widow Sehida said she was sure the Russian secret service was behind her husband's murder, a view echoed by Murat Ozer, head of a Chechen diaspora group in Istanbul.
"Russian intelligence, which previously brutally killed Chechen commanders in Turkey, has added another chapter to the massacres with these murders carried out in the middle of Istanbul," he said.
Turkish media said a manhunt was underway for the suspected killer, a 55-year-old Russian national it named as Alexander Zharkov.
Acting on a tip-off, Turkish Special Forces were reported to have stormed the Russian man's hotel room three days after the killings but to have missed him by a matter of minutes. They reportedly found the murder weapon, a passport, binoculars and a night vision scope however.
He is said to have slipped into the country earlier this month posing as a tourist. His passport showed he had also been in Istanbul in February 2009 when another Chechen man was shot dead.
Turkey is home to many Chechen refugees who fled the region's two brutal wars with Moscow including Vakha Umarov, the brother of Russia's most wanted man, and much of his notorious brother's family.
Russia's daily Izvestia newspaper quoted security service sources as saying that one of the murdered Chechen men was linked to the Moscow airport blast in January. Maxim Shevchenko, a Chechnya expert in the Public Palace, a Kremlin advisory body, said he saw no problem with such people being bumped off by the Kremlin. "If the murdered men really were involved in the suicide bombing then what has happened is a normal occurrence in a war," he said. "After all, they declared war on the Russian state so it is logical that in response our special services have a group of liquidators."
Other Chechens who have fallen out with the Kremlin or its proxies in recent years have been murdered in Dubai, Qatar, and Vienna, while Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who sympathised with Chechen separatists, was famously poisoned in London in 2006.
Telegraph
posted by madtom at 9:11 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home