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Dubai court jails Tajik, Iranian over Chechen army officer murder

23 April 2010 02:59 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. A Dubai court sentenced on Monday two men to 25 years in prison for their roles in the murder of the commander of a Russian Defense Ministry battalion in Chechnya, APA reports quoting RÄ°A Novosti.
Sulim Yamadayev, a Hero of Russia who commanded the elite Vostok Battalion in Chechnya, died in Dubai on March 28, 2009. He was shot in the chest with three bullets from a gold-plated gun in the car park of a luxury apartment complex where he was living with his wife and children.
Tajik businessman Makhsudzhon Ismatov and Iranian Mahdi Lorniya were accused of planning the murder and assisting the man who pulled the trigger. They will be deported to their home countries after serving their terms, which are equivalent to a life sentence in the Gulf state.
Lorniya previously worked in Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov’s stables.
Police said the gun used in the killing had been handed over to them by a Chechen delegation led by Kadyrov that visited the United Arab Emirates in 2008.
The Dubai court rejected in December a request for Kadyrov to be summoned to give evidence at the trial.
The name of the man suspected of pulling the trigger has not been disclosed. Investigators said he acted on information received from Ismatov, who is believed to have helped the man to flee the Emirates.
Dubai police have accused Adam Delimkhanov, Kadyrov’s close friend and a lawmaker in Russia’s lower house of parliament, of ordering the assassination. Both strongly denied any link to the murder.
Both Kadyrov and Yamadayev were former militants who joined Russia’s federal troops. Chechnya saw two separatist wars in the late 1990s-early 2000s. The Vostok Battalion answered to the federal Defense Ministry and clashed on occasion with forces loyal to the Chechen president.
Sulim’s brother Ruslan Yamadayev, a former member of the Russian parliament’s lower house, was gunned down in central Moscow in September 2008. He was a prominent opponent of Kadyrov, who denied any involvement in his killing.