According to The New York Times reporting from Vienna, Austrian prosecutors on Tuesday decided not to accuse directly Kadyrov of the murder of his ex-bodyguard Israilov, although they wanted to do so on Monday. The prosecutors did not explain the reason.
The public prosecutor's office said Tuesday that it changed its mind because "there is not enough evidence against Kadyrov", although that evidence existed on Monday. The prosecutors did not say where this evidence had gone.
"We must be careful as well because this is the president of Chechnya, and we cannot put him in jail so easily", Mikaela Schnell, a speaker for the Vienna public persecutor's ofiice, said Tuesday by telephone to the Vienna correspondent of the US newspaper New York Times Michael Schiwirtz.
She said she could not comment on whether the investigation into Kadyrov's involvement had been halted.
Christina Salzborn, a spoker for the Regional Court of Vienna, said that the indictment had been passed on to the lawyers of the accused, who had 14 days to appeal the charges.
From its part, the correspondent of the Canadiam news agency Canadian Press, Veronika Oleksyn, reported from Vienna that Schnell told her by telephone that all three accomplices in the assassination of the Kadyrov's personal bodyguard face up to life imprisonment in Austria.
Oleksyn also reported that the prosecutors decided not to accuse directly Kadyrov because "there is not enough of evidence" and recalled that in April, the same prosecutor's office announced that it had found evidence of connection between the organizator of murder, Otto Kaltenbrunner, and Kadyrov's personal adviser, Shaa Turlayev.
Kaltenbrunner met Turlayev in Vienna airport along with another criminal, Lecha Bogatyrev, who managed to escape from Austria. The date of the beginning of the trial of the three murder accomplices will be set additionally, the Canadian Press reports from Vienna.
The Austrian press on Tuesday kept mum and did not comment on questionable actions of the Vienna prosecutor's office.
The KGB and KGB-controlled media outlets in Russia (there are no other media outlets in the country), which for some reason do not read the Austrian press (perhaps, because they don't know German), on Tuesday, referring to the New York Times, managed to ignore in general the Kadyrov's involvement, which is the most important issue in this case, and simply reported that " the three suspects in the murder of Umar Israilov, a Ramzan Kadyrov's former security guard, have been charged". The KGB media outlets in Russia reported nothing on Monday.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
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