ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Dozens of protesters marched toward the Russian Consulate in Istanbul on Saturday to denounce the recent killing of three Chechens, a news agency reported. Chechen groups blame Russia's secret service for the killings of the men, who were allegedly involved with Chechen militants.
The three were gunned down near a park in Istanbul on Sept. 16, with shots apparently fired from a car that sped away. Their deaths increased to six the number of Chechens who have been killed in Turkey since 2008.
Turkey has a large ethnic Chechen community, and hundreds of people fleeing fighting in Chechnya, a restive region in Russia’s North Caucasus, have taken refuge here. The protesters included Chechens and members of Turkish pro-Islamic groups.
"God is Great!" and "Bring Russia, the murderer, to account," the demonstrators shouted, according to the private Dogan news agency. It said police prevented the group from reaching the heavily guarded consulate.
Turkish authorities have refused to comment on the latest deaths, saying an investigation is under way. But the Istanbul-based pro-Chechen group, IMKANDER, has identified the victims of the Sept. 16 attack as Berg-Khazh Musaev, Rustam Altemirov and Zavrbek Amriev.
Kavkaz Center, a website sympathetic to the North Caucasus insurgency, described Musaev as a close ally of leading Chechen militant Doku Umarov. It said he went to Turkey more than a year ago for medical treatment for injuries sustained during fighting in Chechnya.
Rustam Altemirov was the subject of an arrest warrant issued by a Moscow court on suspicion of involvement in the bombing of Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in January in which 37 people died and dozens were injured. Umarov claimed responsibility for that bombing.
Izvestia, a Kremlin-loyal paper, reported that all three were thought to be associates of Umarov.
Turkey’s Sabah newspaper said this week that police raided the hotel room of a suspected killer — an alleged Russian agent — in Istanbul, but that the man slipped away shortly before they arrived, leaving behind belongings, including night-vision equipment, a mask and a gun equipped with a silencer. The newspaper cited unidentified police intelligence officials, but police refused to comment on the report.
The paper claimed the alleged agent also was in Istanbul in 2009, during a similar assassination of a Chechen there.
Chechnya’s Moscow-backed strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, has relied on ruthless tactics in fighting the Islamic insurgency after two separatist wars there. Rights activists accuse his black-clad security forces of systematic abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings.
In other attacks against Chechens, Sulim Yamadayev, a Chechen warlord, was shot dead in Dubai in March 2009, a few months after his older brother, a member of Russia’s parliament, was gunned down during rush hour in central Moscow.
It is unclear who was behind that murder, although Dubai authorities initially pinned the killing on a figure close to Kadyrov.
In 2006, Russia’s parliament authorized then-President Vladimir Putin to issue orders to security services to carry out anti-terrorist operations abroad. Some attacks on foreign-based members of the Caucasian insurgency predate that authorization, however.
In 2004, former Chechen separatist President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was assassinated in Qatar. Two Russian intelligence agents were convicted and sent back to Russia to serve their sentences.
The Chechen deaths in Turkey remain a mystery. One of the previous killings in Turkey in 2009, however, may have been linked to a dispute between Chechen groups over the distribution of aid money, Turkish media quoted police as saying at the time.
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Associated Press writer Peter Leonard in Moscow contributed to this report.
