Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [64]
The bandits who burst in in the night shouted, “Why did you bury them here?”
“Well,” I ask, “why did you, when in fact they lived in other villages?”
“So that they would be next to their mother’s grave. They no longer had anybody where they lived,” the relatives answer. They are convinced that Shakhidat and Aimani were not the bombers.
“How can you be so sure?”
“They both had too many things to take care of, and they just weren’t like that.”
Towards evening on the day of the funerals two men, Roman Edilov and Arbi Salmaniev, came to the family’s house. Although Dautkhadzhiev is the surname of Shakhidat and Aimani’s brother, their maiden name is Ablayev because their father had more than one wife and some children took their mother’s name. The Ablayevs and Dautkhadzhievs have adjacent houses in Bachi-Yurt. The wake was taking place after the funerals of Shakhidat and Aimani.
Edilov and Salmaniev are well known in Bachi-Yurt. Edilov is the recently appointed Head of the Kurchaloy District Interior Affairs Office. Before that he was a soldier in Kadyrov’s “Security Service” or, as people here put it, “one of Ramzan’s gang.” Edilov is regarded as someone charged with defending the ruling family’s interests in Kurchaloy. Salmaniev, his deputy and another Kadyrov soldier, lives in Bachi-Yurt.
Salmaniev and Edilov declared the families guilty of the terrorist act committed by Shakhidat and Aimani. “Now,” they said, “you must pay in blood for the attempt on Kadyrov’s life and for the deaths of Ramzan’s soldiers.”
“Did you know this was coming?” I ask Akhmat Temirsultanov, the Qadi (Islamic judge) of Kurchaloy District and Imam of Bachi-Yurt.
The old man – respected, ill, stooped – pretends to be deaf in order not to have to answer the question. I press the point, but to no avail. Even the Qadi and Imam is desperately afraid of falling into disfavor with the Kadyrovs. That fear can today be felt throughout Chechnya, fear of a kind unknown even a year ago. People have learned from the blood-letting, and only the bravest will whisper, “We are afraid of Kadyrov.”
“Does anybody else, do the families of other people who died at Ilaskhan-Yurt, bear a similar grudge against you? Have you been warned by them?” I asked Zinaida Dautkhadzhieva. The ritual of declaring a blood feud is strict. It is not something undertaken lightly, and a qadi or imam should be involved in the procedure.
“No, nobody else has a grudge against us because they know Shakhidat and Aimani were not guilty. The Prosecutor’s Office admitted it made a mistake.”
And so it did. A thorough examination of the bodies of Shakhidat and Aimani, conducted at the insistence of the investigative team at the Prosecutor’s Office leading the inquiry into the bombing, showed there was no need even for a forensic medical examination. The nature of their injuries proved it had not been them. A death sentence caused by a slip of the tongue.
Ivan Nikitin is a tall young man who wears trainers and has a rifle casually slung over his shoulder. He is the leader of the team investigating the “act of sabotage and terrorism” within the framework of Criminal Case No. 32046. Nikitin’s team was set up by the Republican Prosecutor’s Office and is based in Gudermes, close to Ilaskhan-Yurt, in order to be able to question witnesses conveniently.
“These women, Baimuradova, Visayeva and Abdurzakova, were not wearing the explosive devices,” Nikitin confirms. “They were simply standing two metres away from the epicenter. I told Qadi Temirsultanov that when he came to ask whether they were guilty or not. I could see he needed to know that in order to avoid a blood feud.”
“Tell me, then, why was the Prosecutor’s Office in such a hurry to declare that they were the bombers? Here we are