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Step 5. Economic reconstruction. The European Union is called upon to grant large-scale, direct economic aid for the reconstruction of Chechnya.

THE SECRET OF MASKHADOV’S ASSASSINATION. HOW AND WHY THE SECOND PRESIDENT OF CHECHNYA WAS KILLED

September 19, 2005

In the Chechen Supreme Court in Grozny the trial begins this week of those who were with Maskhadov at the moment of his assassination.

Was he killed? Did he commit suicide? Was the body planted? Was it a planned operation or did they happen upon him by chance? It is still debated how and why it was that on March 8, 2005 in the village of Tolstoy-Yurt death came to Aslan Maskhadov, elected President of Chechnya in 1997 and 1999. With the outbreak of the Second Chechen War, it was Maskhadov who led resistance to Russian federal troops and who gradually became the personal enemy of Vladimir Putin.

Before March 8 any conversation with Russian soldiers in Chechnya about Maskhadov and Basayev would conclude with them claiming that everybody knew where Maskhadov was, only the order had not yet been received to bring him in, and that was the sole reason why neither of them was already in prison.

Does that mean that on March 8 the order was finally given? After the killing, both the federals and indeed everybody else started concocting increasingly bizarre and contradictory accounts. He had shot himself. He had ordered his bodyguards to shoot him. He had been killed in a different place and the body had been moved to Tolstoy-Yurt.

Novaya gazeta is in possession of the case files of Criminal Case No. 20/849, relating to the circumstances surrounding Maskhadov’s assassination. The investigation was conducted by the same team from the Prosecutor-General’s Office as the Beslan cases. Four individuals were held from March to September in the Vladikavkaz pre-trial detention facility and gave evidence in the Prosecutor’s Office of North Ossetia. They are now in the dock in Grozny.

The four accused are: Ilias Iriskhanov, one of Maskhadov’s bodyguards who arranged his accommodation in Tolstoy-Yurt; Vakhid Murdashev and Viskhan Khadzhimuratov, Maskhadov’s bodyguards; and Musa (Skandarbek, according to his passport) Yusupov, owner of No. 2 Suvorov Street, Tolstoy-Yurt where Maskhadov stayed without leaving the house from November 17, 2004 to March 8, 2005). All four are charged under the Russian Criminal Code, Article 209, Part 2 (“banditry: membership of an established armed group”); Article 222, Part 3 (“illegal acquisition, storage, or bearing of firearms, explosive devices, military supplies, under the aegis of an organised group”).

The main question is, why was Maskhadov killed in March 2005, and neither earlier nor later? The whole of the last winter of his life was spent in the expectation that peace feelers were about to be put forward. We now know this is not speculation but a fact.

From the evidence of one of the witnesses: “He (Maskhadov) told me that negotiations with Putin were about to begin. On January 23, Aslan Maskhadov told me he had suspended the war on the Chechen side.” Similar testimony is scattered throughout the case. What were Maskhadov’s hopes based on? Who instilled and fostered them right up until his last day?

We know the answer to that. Mainly it was Andreas Gross, a Member of the Swiss Parliament and former rapporteur on Chechnya to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, who visited the Republic under the vigilant monitoring of the Special Operations Executive of the Russian FSB, and accordingly became convinced by the winter of 2004 that he knew all there was to know about Chechnya. Also Akhmed Zakayev, resident in Great Britain, Maskhadov’s Special Envoy in Europe. Also members of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers.

Beginning in November, the very time when Maskhadov moved to Tolstoy-Yurt, Mr Gross began shuttling back and forth between European capitals and Moscow, preparing the ground for round-table discussions on Chechnya. He met a number of highly placed individuals,