Dubai police say Russian parliamentarian ordered murder

Yamadayev

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Police officials in the United Arab Emirates said last weekend that Chechnya’s ex-Prime Minister and “close ally of the Chechen president” was behind the March 31 assassination of a former Chechen separatist living in Dubai. Speaking to reporters, Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan bin Tamim, chief of Dubai’s police, said Adam S. Delimkhanov, who is currently a Member of Parliament in Russia, “is the man behind the assassination of Sulim B. Yamadayev”. Yamadayev was a Chechen rebel commander who fought against Moscow in the 1990s, but in 1999 switched sides and headed an elite pro-Moscow paramilitary squad that targeted the separatists. Last spring, however, after Yamadayev fell out with pro-Moscow Chechen President Ramzan A. Kadyrov, Moscow issued an arrest warrant against him for the 1998 abduction of a Chechen entrepreneur. Shortly after one of his brothers was shot dead in Moscow, Yamadayev moved to the United Arab Emirates. On March 31, however, less than four months after his relocation to Dubai, Yamadayev was shot several times in the head outside the Jumeirah Beach apartment complex in which he lived. He thus became the latest target in a recent wave of assassinations of former Chechen commanders by mysterious assailants, who many suspect are commissioned by the Russian intelligence services. At last Sunday’s news conference, Lieutenant General Tamim said police have already arrested two suspects, Makhsud-Jan from Tajikistan, and Mahdi Lournia from Iran, one of whom has already confessed taking part in the assassination. The Dubai police are also in reportedly in possession of intercepted telephone exchanges, in which one of the arrestees is heard saying “Sulim has arrived”, shortly after the assassination. Four other suspects have already fled back to Russia, Tamim said. Adam S. Delimkhanov, the member of Russia’s Parliament who the Emiratis say is behind Yamadayev’s murder, dismissed the charge yesterday as “a provocation and an attempt to destabilize conditions in the Chechen Republic”. Meanwhile, the Associated Press has quoted an unnamed official at the Office of the Russian Prosecutor General in Moscow as stating that Delimkhanov would never be extradited under Russian law, regardless of the outcome of the Dubai investigation.