Boris Nemtsov murder suspect: police forced me to confess to killing

By The Guardian

A former law enforcement officer charged with involvement in the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov says he was forced to confess to the killing.

Zaur Dadayev, who was the deputy commander of the north interior ministry battalion in Russia’s restive Chechnya republic, was detained in neighbouring Ingushetia and charged with the murder in Moscow this weekend.

During a court hearing to place him under arrest, a Moscow judge said he had admitted the crime. Nemtsov was killed by four shots to the back on 27 February as he walked across a bridge next to the Kremlin.

The Rosbalt news agency later reported that Dadayev had told investigators he killed Nemtsov because of the politician’s allegedly negative statements about Islam, quoting unnamed law enforcement sources.

Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s strongman leader, said in an Instagram post on Sunday that Dadayev had been “shocked” by the support for the Charlie Hebdo journalists killed in Paris over caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.

But members of a prisoners’ rights monitoring group that visited Dadayev and two other suspects in Moscow’s Lefortovo detention centre on Tuesday allegedly found evidence that the confession had been forced.

Dadayev said he had been held in shackles for two days with a bag over his head,reported Yeva Merkachyova, a member of the monitoring group and a journalist at the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets.

He said: “They were yelling the whole time, ‘you killed Nemtsov?’ I was answering no. When I was detained, I was with a friend, my former subordinate Ruslan Yusupov, and they said that if I agreed they would let him go. I agreed. I thought that I would save him, and they would take me to Moscow alive. Otherwise what happened to Shavanov would have happened to me.”

Beslan Shavanov, another member of the north battalion suspected of involvement in Nemtsov’s murder, was killed when police attempted to detain him in the Chechen capital, Grozny, this weekend. Law enforcement sources said Shavanov threw a grenade at officers before blowing himself up with a second grenade.

Four other men from the Caucasus were arrested along with Dadayev; one of them, Anzor Gubashev, was charged with involvement in the murder. The monitoring group saw cuts and bruises on Gubashev’s arms and legs, and was told by his brother Shagid Gubashev, also a suspect, that he was beaten after being detained.

Russia’s investigative committee said on Wednesday that it would summon Merkachyova and another member of the monitoring group for questioning, claiming that they had violated the law by “asking about the materials of a criminal case” during a visit meant to assess the conditions of confinement.

Dadayev’s reported confession has raised fears that he will serve as a patsy for more influential people that could have ordered the hit on Nemtsov. In several previous political killings – such as the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 – perpetrators have been sentenced without revealing who commissioned them.

In his post on Sunday, Kadyrov said Dadayev had left the north battalion, which is commanded by the brother of Kadyrov ally and MP Adam Delimkhanov. However, according to an interior ministry official quoted in the news agency Tass, Dadayev had been on holiday and was dismissed the day after Nemtsov’s killing.

Caucasus experts, such as Oleg Orlov of the human rights group Memorial, have said it is unlikely Dadayev could have carried out such a complicated crime without the knowledge of his superiors.

The Nobel peace prize-nominated independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported on Tuesday that Vladimir Putin had been informed that Nemtsov had been on a kill list and the likely organiser of the hit was a former north battalion officer named “Ruslan” who is related to a high-ranking Chechen security official.

Speaking to the radio station Ekho Moskvy on Wednesday, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he could not comment on whether the president was given such information, but added that the report of a kill list with the name of Nemtsov and other opposition leaders was absurd.