Government critic discovered dead on Saturday near Vienna with gunshot wounds
Austrian police arrested two Russians from Chechnya for the death of a Chechen dissident.
A 43-year-old man discovered dead with gunshot wounds in Gerasdorf, near Vienna, on Saturday. Police arrested a 47-year-old boy in Linz, two hundred miles from the capital. A 37-year-old Russian moment, also from Chechnya and a resident of Austria, arrested on Sunday for investigating the murder of his Russian compatriot.
Police in a statement: “The motives for the crime are unclear.”
A spokesman for the prosecutor’s workplace knew the dead man as Martin B, a critic of the Chechen government. They said the prosecutors were a court order to keep the suspect in custody.
Police said the victim was an asylum seeker. The suspect lives in Austria and is from the Chechnya region.
Ukraine’s internal ministry told AFP that the dead man testified in a murder case in Ukraine in 2017. The case involved the murder of the wife of a man who had planned to assassinate Vladimir Putin.
The shooting in Vienna comes amid growing fear of protecting Chechen dissidents living in exile. In February, an exiled Chechen blogger criticizing Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov repelled an attacker armed with a hammer.
A month earlier, Chechen opposition leader Imran Aliyev was discovered dead in a hotel room in Lille, northern France, after being stabbed 135 times.
Chechnya is a Muslim-majority Russian republic in the north of the Caucasus. Two wars in it triggered a wave of emigration, with many Chechens heading to Western Europe.
More Chechens have fled into exile in years due to disagreements with the pro-Kremlin Kadyrov, whom human rights activists accuse of repeated violations of rights.