Vol. 8 Issue 7 - Public International Law & Policy Group

Israilov, who was finally shot dead by a pair of gunmen near the Vienna flat where he lived
with his wife and three children, said he had noticed men watching his home and following
him in the street.
Worse still, the police admitted they had been contacted in June 2008 by a Chechen man,
nicknamed Arbi in the press, who said he had been sent to kill Israilov.
He offered to fake the murder and proposed that Israilov be given a new identity but instead,
he was charged for delivering threats and sent back to Russia.
"We could use the murder trial to denounce torture," noted the ECCHR.
But a month after the murder, investigators say they have no new evidence to reveal in the
case.
Chechen rebel returns and denounces insurgency
Jim Heintz, Associated Press, 2/17/09
A top rebel returned to Chechnya and denounced its insurgency Tuesday, according to a
rebel Web site and the regional president who has been lauded for reconstruction but accused
of rampant rights violations.
The return of Bukhari Barayev could be a substantial propaganda boost for Chechen
President Ramzan Kadyrov, who has been leading the rebuilding of the war-shattered region
with tens of millions of dollars from the federal government.
But it could also raise new suspicions that Kadyrov is putting unbearable pressure on exiled
rebels or buying them off. Human rights groups have repeatedly accused Chechen authorities
of killings, arbitrary arrests, torture and other abuses.
Such suspicions gained wide attention last month when a dissident former bodyguard of
Kadyrov's, Umar Israilov, was gunned down in Vienna. Austrian authorities said last week
that Israilov had filed a criminal complaint against Kadyrov, accusing him of torture and
other abuses in Chechnya.
Barayev also lived in Vienna, where he acted as European envoy for the Chechen rebels, and
had attended Israilov's funeral where he accused Kadyrov of murder in a speech, according to
the rebel Web site Kavkaz Center.
Barayev's son Movsar led the 2002 seizure of some 900 hostages at a Moscow theater by
Chechen rebels; the siege ended in the deaths of at least 130 hostages, most of them from the
narcotic gas that Russian police pumped into the theater to disable the attackers.
His brother, Arbi, had been one of Chechnya's most feared warlords before he was killed by
Russian forces in 2001.