Witness: Nemtsov Killed After Threats from Chechen Leader
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Vadim Prokhorov, the lawyer for Alexander Ryklin, editor of the Moscow online news source Yezhedenvny Zhurnal, said Ryklin repeated his contention to investigators that Kadyrov made threats against Nemtsov over coverage of Chechen politics, the Russian newspaper RIA Novosti said Thursday.
Nemtsov, a frequent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration and co-chairman of the opposition Parnas party, was shot to death as he walked on a Moscow street the night of Feb. 27. A weapon was never found, and five people have been detained on suspicion of killing Nemtsov or providing information to the killer.
Prokhorov stated Nemtsov was threatened while visiting the Chechen Republic, a part of Russia with an active pro-independence movement and a pro-Russian government regarded as oppressive.
Zhanna Nemstova, Nemstov’s daughter, wrote last week in the British newspaper the Guardian she believed her father was a victim of Russian government propaganda and that “Putin’s information presents opposition activists as ‘aliens’ and employs criminal propaganda techniques to sow hatred, which in turn spawns violence and terror. Its modus operandi? To dehumanize the target.”
The article, reprinted from the Russian publication Vedomosti, did not mention Chechnya or Kadyrov, but blamed the “pro-Putin media” and its power to incite “people to participate in the war in eastern Ukraine and commit violence against the Russian opposition.”
“The result? Thousands of people dead in the Donbass and attacks on human-rights activists in Moscow and Grozny,” she added. “My father fell victim to this hateful propaganda.”
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