In late January, 44-year-old Imran Aliyev, a blogger of Chechen origin, was stabbed to death in a hotel in the French city of Lille, a knife was left near the body.
Aliyev, who was also known as Old Mansur, lived in Belgium, where he was granted political refugee status. On social media, the man made toughly worded comments on the activity of Chechnya’s strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. Aliyev had a room at the Coq Hardi hotel for only one night; on January, 30 he was found dead. Aliyev booked the room together with another man of the ‘same nationality’, news agency AFP reports with reference to a source close to the police.
“In this murder, everything is indicative of political motives, but one should not make hasty conclusions,” AFP quotes the source.
For the time being, the French investigators are not going to detain anyone. However, the reputed Chechen blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov claimed he knew the name of the alleged killer and revealed the details of the tragedy. According to him, the hitman, a resident of Chechnya’s Gudermes district, has already returned to the republic by plane from Berlin. He works for a high-ranking Chechen official, Abdurakhmanov suggests.
“For some reason, the person who had committed the crime did not go to the nearest airport in Brussels, but covered 1,000 km to reach that of Berlin, which proves that he probably had accomplices there,” the blogger stressed.
Imran Aliyev is the second unmasker of the Kadyrov regime to have been assasinated in the European Union over the past six months. In August, Georgian citizen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili was killed in Berlin, and the alleged performer, a Russian who had previously served in the FSB special forces, was arrested in this case. After the murder of Khangoshvili, German authorities expelled two Russian ambassadors claiming the duo might have had some connection to the crime.
The news story was part of Belsat TV news show That Way (Vot Tak)
Belsat.eu
