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CIS

Colleagues say Islamist motive for killing Nemtsov is nonsense

09 March 2015 18:20 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Suggestions that Russian politician Boris Nemtsov was killed by Chechen Islamists are nonsense designed to deflect suspicion from President Vladimir Putin, associates of the slain opposition figure said on Monday, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Investigators have charged two men, including a former Chechen police official, over the shooting of Nemtsov within sight of the Kremlin walls on Feb. 27. Three more men have been arrested, and another blew himself up late on Saturday as police in Chechnya tried to detain him, Russian media said.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said the charged ex-policeman, Zaur Dadayev, was a pious Muslim who had been angered by publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Nemtsov had condemned an attack on Charlie Hebdo in which Islamist militants killed 12 people in January. But friends reject this as a motive, saying they do not believe Islamist gunmen acting alone could have shot him dead in one of the most closely guarded areas of central Moscow unless they had powerful and well-connected backers.

These associates believe it was Putin who stood to gain from his killing, though Russian officials have denied involvement and the president has called it a shameful tragedy.

"Our worst fears are coming true," Ilya Yashin, the co-leader of Nemtsov's small liberal opposition party, said on Twitter late on Sunday. "The trigger man will be blamed, while those who actually ordered Nemtsov's killing will go free."

"Investigators' nonsensical theory about Islamist motives in Nemtsov's killing suits the Kremlin and takes Putin out of the firing line," Yashin added on Monday.

Nemtsov, a 55-year-old former deputy prime minister, was shot in the back four times as he walked home with his girlfriend after dining next to Red Square. He was the most prominent of a string of Kremlin critics to be killed during Putin's 15 years in power.

Dadayev and four other suspects, all ethnic Chechens, appeared in a Moscow court on Sunday.

"This is an attempt to find a motive that masks the main aim: getting rid of one of the leaders of the opposition," Vladimir Ryzhkov, a prominent Putin opponent, told Ekho Moskvy radio station. "I am sure that there are much more high-ranking people mixed up in this."