Adam Salmanovich Dzhabrailov (right)
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Mesker-Yurt's Executioner
// Rebel who killed hostages arrested
Investigation
The Shalin District Court in Chechnya has approved the arrest of Adam Dzhabrailov, who is suspected of taking part in the 1996 shootings of six members of the International Red Cross in the village of Starye Agati. An investigation has uncovered that the rebel was involved in another well-known crime as well, the execution of four engineers from the British company Granger Telecom in 1998.
Mesker-Yurt resident Adam Dzhabrailov was taken into custody in his home town on April 4 by the Main Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Southern Federal District. “He has been wanted since March of last year on suspicion of committing several attacks on employees of the local administration and Chechen police,” Deputy Minister of the Interior of Chechnya Sultan Satuev told Kommersant. “However, in the course of the preliminary investigation, it was discovered that the rebel had something to do with serious crimes during the Maskhadov regime, that is kidnapping and the murder of foreigners.”
The most serious of these crimes was the massacre of four foreign engineers in 1998. Britons Peter Kennedy, Darrel Hickey, Rudolf Petschi and New Zealander Stanley Shaw, who worked for the British firm Granger Telecom under contract with Chechentelekom, were restoring the republic's cellular telephone system when they were kidnapped just before they were due to return home. All the law enforcement agencies of independent Ichkeria were involved in the search for them. Several suspects were arrested at the time, but later released for lack of evidence. The management of Chechentelekom was more successful in its investigation. They quickly determined that their foreign workers were in the hands of field commander Arbi Baraev.
Businessmen from Chechentelekom took one of Baraev's deputies hostage and proposed exchanging him for the foreigners. Baraev refuse to make an exchange, saying he would release the hostages only for $10 million ransom. “Do what you want with my deputy, I have enough of them. I need money,” he is rumored to have replied. Unsuccessful negotiations resulted in the execution of the hostages. In the beginning of December 1998, after two months of captivity, the heads of the hostages were found alongside a road in the village of Assinovskaya. Baraev's followers demanded $2000 a piece for the return of the bodies.
Nothing was known about the investigation until now. Little attention was paid to the case after Baraev was liquidated in the summer of 2002. Only six years after the crime did Chechen operatives get a lead on one of the murderers. On December 21, 2004, Chechen special forces killed Isa Sakaev, a follower of Baraev, in a private home in Grozny. Ilya Shabalkin, a representative of the Regional Operative Staff to Manage Counterterrorist Operations in the North Caucasus, told Kommersant at that time that Sakaev was directly involved in the killing of the British and New Zealand engineers. “That conclusion was reached by investigators based on material found on the rebel and information received earlier from followers of Baraev,” he said.
That was how the first suspect was found. “He [Dzhabrailov] made a confession and described his role in the kidnapping and murder of the foreigners in detail,” Chechen Prosecutor Vladimir Kravchenko said on Wednesday. He added that Dzhabrailov's account matches the material evidence and, after the necessary checks are made, he will be officially charged.
Even though he has been cooperating with investigators, Dzhabrailov has little hope of receiving leniency. “He will answer fully for all the crimes he has committed,” Kravchenko said. Besides the killings of the Britons and New Zealander, Dzhabrailov is suspected of being involved in many other crimes committed by rebels in the last few years. These include the killings of six Red Cross workers and even the hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater Center in Moscow (the musical Nord-Ost) “There is nothing surprising about that. Dzhabrailov was a relative of Baraev's and fulfilled his orders with zeal,” Shabalkin said.
Musa Muradov
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 07, 2005
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