Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [141]
Athens: On August 21, 2003, Vladimir Gusinsky is arrested upon his arrival from a holiday in Israel, based on an Interpol warrant on charges of fraud and money laundering. He is released on bail but ordered to remain in the country. On October 14, a Greek court rejects Moscow’s request to extradite him. At a hearing lasting only a few minutes, the three judges decide that the charges against Gusinsky do not amount to a crime under Greek law.
If Pavel was the FSB turncoat who unexpectedly helped Boris win asylum, a man named Duk-Vakha Dushuyev, a Chechen whose story was no less bizarre, proved to be the reason Zakayev defeated Russia’s attempt at extradition. Sasha was once again the go-between, and once again triumphant.
The Russian charges against Zakayev were severe: according to them, he was a torturer and a mass murderer. He was said to have led a Chechen gang in the 1999 war and to bear the responsibility for killing at least three hundred Russian officers. The indictment went on to claim that Zakayev had personally tortured a suspected Russian informer, Ivan Solovyov.
“When Solovyov refused to ‘confess’ to co-operating with the Russian Federal Security Service, Zakayev produced a gun which he threatened Solovyov with,” the indictment stated. “He then pressed the barrel of the gun against Solovyov’s little finger on his right hand and pulled the trigger, shooting the finger off. He did the same thing to the left hand, shooting two fingers off.”
Zakayev was also alleged to have kidnapped and tortured two Russian Orthodox priests. Presiding over the hearings was Judge Workman.
There was no presumption of innocence here: the defense had to prove that the charges were false, not the other way around. Zakayev’s lawyer pointed out that all of the opposing witnesses and victims had signed their statements in November 2002, when Zakayev was already in a Danish jail, suggesting that the case had been hastily concocted. But it wasn’t much of a defense. On the morning of July 24, the defense announced a surprise witness, a man whose particularly damaging sworn testimony against Zakayev had been introduced by the Russian side. It was Duk-Vakha Dushuyev, a Chechen who, in his signed statement, had claimed that he personally saw Zakayev give the orders to kidnap and torture the priests. How he got out of Chechnya and into England was a mystery.
Duk-Vakha Dushuyev was a short, balding man. There was a frozen, odd grin on his face, possibly the result of the ordeal he now unveiled to the court. On November 27, 2002, he said, he was detained by the FSB in Grozny and brought to a Russian army base, where he was thrown into a filthy pit half-filled with water and covered by a metal grid. The pit was so narrow that he could not sit, and so shallow that he could not stand up. He spent six days there, bent over, handcuffed, and with a sack over his head. He was taken out for interrogations, during which he was beaten for hours, tortured with electric shocks, and threatened with having his throat slit unless he agreed to give testimony against Zakayev. On the sixth day he agreed to testify that as a fighter under Zakayev’s direct command in 1997 he overheard him giving the orders to kidnap the priests.
He was brought to an investigator’s office in Grozny to sign a statement, the one submitted by Russia to the London court, only with Dushuyev’s name blacked out. Then he was put in front of a TV camera operated by men in military uniform, where he