Zarema Umarova spoke to RFE/RL on July 24, a day after relatives of her slain husband, Mamikhan Umarov, issued an unusual video appeal in which they claimed responsibility for his killing and appeared to absolve Chechnya's notorious strongman leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, of blame.
Umarova's comments add further details about the circumstances of the killing -- the latest in a series of attacks that have targeted Chechen refugees who fled Russia for various European countries.
The killings have spooked Chechnya's diaspora and renewed focus on Kadyrov, who has run the Russian region for more than a decade and been accused of human rights abuses and ordering hit squads to target expatriate Chechens.
Comment: Extremist Chechens tied to al-Qaeda and the Caucasus Emirate - who led a separatist jihad against Russia in the '90s - do tend to wind up dead in foreign countries, especially Turkey. These could very well be assassinations carried out by elements of Russian/Chechen intelligence. Outlets like RFE/RL leave out that the apparent victims of these operations have histories of terrorism. For such mainstream sources, it's okay when the CIA or Mossad kills terrorists on foreign soil. It's not okay when Russians do so.
Austrian police have arrested two Chechen asylum seekers as part of their investigation into the July 4 killing in the Vienna suburb of Gerasdorf. Austrian officials have said a political motive or a personal argument could be behind the killing.
Umarov, who went by the name Anzor as well as the alias Martin Beck, was a former Chechen separatist and critic of Kadyrov. He settled in Austria in 2005 and received asylum two years later.
Comment: There you go. Naturally RFE/RL doesn't explain what that means. The Chechen separatists weren't just "moderate rebels". Like their brothers in Syria - where many Chechens went to wage jihad - they were Salafi-jihadists, i.e. al-Qaeda.
Comment: This whole 'woke' business is getting out of hand. It's amazing that in 2020, we as a society have regressed back to judging people based on race. And to spin widespread layoffs as something progressive is so tone deaf it's amazing the PR department let it go through.
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