Russian accused of Chechen assassination plot stands trial in Germany

MUNICH (Reuters) -A Russian citizen went on trial in Munich on Wednesday on charges of agreeing to carry out the contract killing of a Chechen dissident on behalf of people linked to Ramzan Kadyrov, strongman ruler of Russia’s autonomous Chechnya region.

German prosecutors believed the thwarted killing was meant to frighten into silence the 27-year-old intended victim’s elder brother, another activist for Chechen independence who lives in exile in Stockholm.

“For the Chechen government, the intended victim and his brother were and are enemies of the state,” Frank Stuppi of the federal prosecutor’s office said outside the courthouse.

Prosecutors have said that a member of Kadyrov’s security apparatus contracted the accused Valid D. for the killing in the first half of 2020.

They said he agreed to the plan, obtained a gun with ammunition and a silencer and scoped out the area where the intended victim lived.

“Thanks to tips to the police, the accused could be arrested and the crime prevented,” Stuppi said.

Valid D., whose full name is withheld from publication under German privacy law, denies the prosecutors’ allegations, his defence attorney was cited by Der Spiegel magazine as saying.

Earlier this year, German media reported that the intended victim was Mokhmad Abdurakhmanov, whose brother Tumso was himself the target of a murder attempt in February 2020.

Mokhmad is an outspoken critic of Kadyrov.

“No honourable Chechen would enter Ukrainian territory with a weapon in hand to fight for the interests of the Russian Federation and its President Vladimir Putin,” he said in a recent YouTube video, according to public broadcaster BR – a reference to Chechens fighting on the side of Russian forces that invaded Ukraine in February.

The trial, set to run until December, casts a renewed spotlight on the activities of Russian agents in Germany and Europe more broadly, including those of contract killers from Chechnya, a lawless fiefdom where Kadyrov has been given a free hand by Moscow.

Last year, a Russian was convicted of the 2019 murder of Chechen-born Georgian citizen Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in broad daylight in a central Berlin park. Russian citizen Vadim Krasikov was sent to prison for life for the killing.

(Reporting by Ayhan Uyanik and Louisa Off, writing by Thomas Escritt, Editing by William Maclean and Mark Heinrich)