Austrian probe finds Chechen president behind Vienna killing

Ramzan Kadyrov

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A report by Austrian government officials has found that the Moscow-appointed President of Chechnya ordered the 2009 assassination in Vienna of a Chechen dissident, who had been given political asylum by Austrian authorities. In 2009, Umar Israilov, who was once a bodyguard of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, alleged in Vienna and in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg that Kadyrov had “personally participated in the torture of detainees”. But on January 13, 2009, Israilov was shot dead by two men in broad daylight outside a grocery store located less than two miles from Vienna’s historic city center. Now the Vienna Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism has said in a detailed report that Israilov’s murder was a political assassination ordered personally by Chechen President Kadyrov, who is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The report, which was leaked to German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, claims that Kadyrov has set up a private military intelligence army in Austria, headed by a Chechen assassin using the name “Otto Kaltenbrunner”. Commenting on the leaked report, Manfred Nowak, a legal expert at the Vienna-based Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights, told Der Spiegel that it was time to “issue an international arrest warrant” for Ramzan Kadyrov. The New York Times is one of a handful of Western news outlets that have reported on the assassinations of Chechens in Europe. The paper has published a lengthy account of Israilov’s activities and assassination, available here.