Russian court convicts five men of murdering Putin critic Nemtsov
A court on Thursday convicted five men of murdering Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, more than two years after he was shot dead near the Kremlin.
Nemtsov, one of President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, was murdered in 2015 as he walked across a bridge in the heart of Moscow after dining with his girlfriend. Aged 55, he had been working on a report examining Russia’s role in Ukraine. His killing sent a chill through opposition circles.
After more than eight months of hearings, a jury trial convicted five men of his murder on Thursday, including the man prosecutors said pulled the trigger, Zaur Dadayev, a former soldier in Chechnya.
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It said the four others had acted as his accomplices and that the group had been promised a bounty of 15 million roubles ($253,889.59) for the high-profile assassination.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday it was up to investigators, not the Kremlin, to decide whether further investigation was needed into the killing of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, Interfax news agency reported.
Nemtsov’s supporters welcomed the verdict, but said Dadayev and the others were low-level operatives. The case remained unsolved, they said, because those who had ordered, financed and organised the hit had not been caught.
“It’s the biggest crime of the century and yet they haven’t identified the real organisers or those who ordered it,” Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer for the late politician’s daughter, told reporters after the verdict.
“The Russian government was not prepared to look into the entourage of (Chechen leader Ramzan) Kadyrov,” he said, despite his view that one of the masterminds was a close associate of the Chechen strongman.
Zhanna Nemtsova, the slain politician’s daughter, has repeatedly said she wanted Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed head of Chechnya who calls himself “Putin’s foot soldier”, to be questioned about what he knew about the case. Kadyrov has praised the trigger man Dadayev as a “true patriot of Russia.”
But Kadyrov, who has denied allegations he was personally involved, never appeared before the court.
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