1. Chechnya Weekly: Volume 7, Issue 41
- Publication Date:
- 10-2006
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
- Abstract:
- Kommersant reported on October 25 that investigators believe former officers of an Interior Ministry unit from Siberia's Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous Okrug, which had been deployed in Chechnya, were involved in the October 7 murder of Novaya gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya (Chechnya Weekly, October 12). Politkovskaya published an article in September 2001 accusing officers from the regional Department of Internal Affairs (UVD) in the city of Nizhnevartovsk of committing various human rights abuses while stationed in Chechnya. In particular, she accused Sergei Lapin, a senior lieutenant from the Nizhnevartovsk UVD's criminal investigation department, known by his nickname “Kadet,” along with two of his superiors, Major Aleksandr Prilepin and Colonel Valery Minin, of complicity in the January 2001 abduction and murder of Grozny resident Zelimkhan Murdalov. In subsequent articles, she accused these and other members of the Nizhnevartovsk unit of murdering a number of other Chechen civilians. Novaya gazeta subsequently received an email death threat signed by “Kadet” and Politkovskaya fled to Austria for a time (The Monitor, October 18, 2001).
- Topic:
- Security and Ethnic Conflict
- Political Geography:
- Russia and Chechnya