Chechen Human Rights Lawyer Shot Dead
MOSCOW - The lawyer who fought against the early release from jail of a former Russian tank commander imprisoned for murdering a young Chechen woman was shot dead by a gunman in central Moscow on Monday, officials said.
The lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, had attempted a last-minute appeal against the release of the former commander, Yuri D. Budanov, a decorated Russian Army colonel before he was stripped of his rank, who was freed last Thursday.
A journalist who was with Mr. Markelov was also shot and seriously injured, according to Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the prosecutor general’s investigative wing. The journalist, whose identity could not be immediately confirmed, worked for a newspaper that has been highly critical of the government’s Chechnya policy.
Mr. Markelov was shot near a building where he had just finished a news conference, The Associated Press reported. He had told reporters he might file an appeal in an international court against the early release of Mr. Budanov.
The decision to release him has rekindled animosities born of nearly a decade of intermittent war in Chechnya, the restive southern Russian republic. Mr. Budanov was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2003, but a court in the Ulyanovsk region agreed last month to grant him early parole for good behavior, and the last-minute appeal by Mr. Markelov failed to keep him in custody.
News of the court’s decision last month to grant Mr. Budanov’s parole led to protest rallies in Chechnya. Human rights groups and Chechen officials, two sides that often clash, have raised a single voice of alarm over Mr. Budanov’s release.
Mr. Budanov was the highest-ranking officer among only a handful of Russian soldiers punished for what human rights groups say were numerous atrocities committed by federal forces in two wars against Chechen separatists. For many in Chechnya he has become a hated symbol of those atrocities.
He has admitted to abducting Elza Kungayeva, an 18-year-old Chechen woman, and strangling her in a fit of rage in his quarters in March 2000, thinking her to be an enemy sniper. In proceedings that highlighted the capriciousness of Russian justice, he was initially acquitted on grounds that he was temporarily insane at the time of the killing, and convicted in a second trial.
The conviction raised expectations among battle-weary Chechens that their submission to Russian authority would at least open avenues for addressing wartime grievances. Few others were punished, however, despite voluminous evidence of extrajudicial killings, abductions and torture committed by Russian soldiers.
Though the fight against separatists has largely ended and Chechnya is now firmly under Moscow’s control, the republic has yet to truly reckon with the years of bloody conflict that left thousands dead.
Rather, open discussion of the war and its legacy has been stifled by a Kremlin-installed government, which, under Chechnya’s strong-arm president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, has imposed a whitewashed official history that has sought to play down Russian responsibility.
Yet, in a region where loyalties to clan can supersede national pride and murderous blood feuds can rage for decades, some say Mr. Budanov’s release - just under a year and a half before the end of his prison term - now threatens to disrupt Chechnya’s tenuous stability.
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ETA:
- Markelov's safety was already in danger even before this case.
- AI statement. For some reason the NYT article doesn't mention that the girl was also raped.