Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [45]
One other recent accusation levelled against you is that you were involved in the brutal murder of a shepherd and three of his assistants on April 17 in your native village of Alleroy in Kurchaloy District.
I did receive operational intelligence that a reconnaissance group of Russian troops brutally murdered a shepherd and his three assistants in broad daylight on April 17, 2001 in Alleroy. They were murdered between noon and 4:00 p.m. hours beside the ravine where their bodies were discovered, and there were numerous prints in the mud from soldiers’ boots and gumboots. It appears that before they were shot they were forced to lie face down on the ground, and afterwards shot once more in the head.
The names of the murder victims are Khozhakhmed Alsultanov, a shepherd, 44, the brother of Saidakhmet Alsultanov who was a bodyguard of the President of Chechnya assassinated in 1998; Khozhakhmed’s son, Islam; and two nephews, Shamkhan and Shakhid Umarkhadzhiev.
Our preliminary investigation has revealed that on the afternoon of April 17 Kadyrov’s elder brother-in-law was celebrating a housewarming. Kadyrov also attended, with numerous bodyguards. Russian reconnaissance troops were observed in the south-east and north-east outskirts of the village and we imagine that the group which shot the shepherds did so at that time.
A WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION BECOMES A WITNESS FOR THE DEFENCE. THE ZAKAYEV CASE: THE LATEST SENSATION IN A LONDON COURT
July 28, 2003
There were few people in Court 3 of Bow Street Magistrates Court, London on the morning of July 24, 2003. Although hearings were resuming in the case of The Government of the Russian Federation versus Akhmed Zakayev, the Russian side had already indicated that the day would be of little interest, as they always do when there is to be cross-questioning of a witness for Zakayev’s defence. This time there was a noticeable lack of members of our Prosecutor-General’s Office, who are usually only too eager to come to London. Sergey Fridinsky, Deputy Public Prosecutor for the Southern Federal Region, charged with ensuring the extradition of Maskhadov’s Special Representative, had decided not to fly in. Igor Mednik, Investigator of the Southern District Prosecutor’s Office and second-in-command of the Zakayev case, had also decided to ignore Zakayev’s defence witnesses.
How unwise. Mednik and Fridinsky would have been surprised to discover that a witness for the prosecution, a supposed victim of Zakayev, was instead appearing before Judge Timothy Workman as a witness for Zakayev’s defence. In the case materials sent from Moscow and prepared by Investigator Mednik, Duk-Vakha Dushuyev figures as Zakayev’s former bodyguard, who in December 2002 testified that in January 1996, on the orders of the individual whose extradition is sought, his other bodyguards had taken hostage two Orthodox priests, in Chechnya on a peacekeeping mission, in order to hold them to ransom. These were Father Anatoly Chistousov, who subsequently died in captivity, and Father Sergius Zhigulin, whose monastic name is Father Philip and from whom the court had already heard evidence.
Background
Akhmed Zakayev, born 1959 in Kazakhstan, graduated from the Department of Choreography of the Grozny College of Culture and Enlightenment and the Voronezh State Institute of Arts. From 1981 to 1990, actor with the Khanpasha Nuradilov Grozny Drama Theatre.
From 1991, Chairman of the Union of Theatre Workers of Chechnya and Board Member of the UTW of Russia.
From 1994, Minister of Culture of Chechnya.
From 1995, from the beginning of the First Chechen War, Commander of the Urus Martan Front. Subsequently Brigadier-General, Aide to the President of Ichkeria for National Security, member of the delegation preparing the Khasavyurt Agreements [which ended the First Chechen War in 1996].
Stood in 1997 for the presidency