Swedish media link attack on Tumso with killings of Kadyrov's opponents in Europe

Jens Shelund, an advocate for Tumso Abdurakhmanov, has drawn attention of Swedish media to the blood feud announced by Speaker Magomed Daudov to the blogger. The assassination of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili has caused a political scandal; therefore, new executions of Kadyrov's critics are presented as domestic crimes, the "Vaifond" Association asserts.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the above attack on Tumso Abdurakhmanov was committed on February 26, when the attacker penetrated his apartment with a hammer. Abdurakhmanov managed to disarm him and called the police. Both were hospitalized. On March 3, it became known that Swedish law enforcers suspected Ruslan Mamaev, a Russian citizen, of attempting to kill Tumso Abdurakhmanov.

Jens Shelund, a Tumso's Swedish advocate, gave his first comment to reporters, drawing attention to the threats voiced by the Chechen authorities against the blogger.

"He (Abdurakhmanov) is threatened by the Speaker of the Chechen Parliament, who declared blood feud to him because of his criticism of the Chechen regime," the Swedish Radio quoted Mr Shelund as saying on March 4.

The Swedish media are drawing attention to the recent killings of critics of the Chechen authorities in Germany and France.

Since August 2019, two opponents of the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, have been assassinated in the European Union: on August 23, 2019, Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a native of the Pankisi Gorge and a participant in the second Chechen campaign, was shot dead in Berlin; and Imran Aliev, a native of Chechnya, known as blogger Mansur Stary, was killed in the French city of Lille in January 2020.

The impudent assassination of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, who was shot dead in broad daylight, "led to unnecessary hype for Russia": shortly after this crime, Russian diplomats were expelled from Germany; and Vladimir Putin at the meeting of the "Norman Four" in December 2019 "tried to ascribe everything to the criminal world and internal showdowns," the "Vaifond" Association notes in the publication posted on its website.

The authors of the publication suggest that the diplomatic scandal after Khangoshvili's murder forced the organizers of custom killings to change the crime tools: Imran Aliev was stabbed to death, while the attack on Tumso Abdurakhmanov was undertaken with a hammer, since it is much easier to explain such crimes "by usual criminal or domestic showdowns."

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on March 5, 2019 at 05:55 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.