The incident took place in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya on Saturday late evening. Policemen were blocking the suspect in his apartment in one of the houses. When demanded to surrender, the suspect threw grenade at the officers, triggering an unexpected explosion. As a result of the explosion, he immediately died of shrapnel wounds. It was not reported about the injured among law enforcement officers.
On March 7, Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the F.S.B., announced on state-run TV that two suspects were detained in connection with the murder of Boris Nemtsov, and identified them as Anzor Gubashev and Zaur Dadayev, adding that both men were residents of the North Caucasus. It is unclear whether either of the detained men is suspected for firing the shots that killed Nemtsov.
According to the information in Russian news agencies on Sunday, one of the men was a former police officer.
An unidentified source told Interfax that the police had managed to trace the suspects through cellphone activity around the site of the murder, and from DNA testing of evidence found in the suspected car. Although these two suspects are believed to be the perpetrators of the murder, the people who organized it have yet to be identified.
Commenting on the progress of the investigation, “it is hard to judge whether these are the real perpetrators or whether the investigation went down the wrong track,” Ilya Yashin, the co-chairman of Nemtsov’s Republican Party of Russia – People’s Freedom Party, posted on his Facebook page.
Yashin urged the authorities to present the public with any substantial evidence they had. Furthermore, he wrote that the authorities had to identify not just the perpetrators, but whoever was behind them. “If whoever ordered it can avoid responsibility, then the practice of political assassinations will no doubt continue,” he added.
Yashin told The independent: “When someone in the government’s propaganda is turned into an enemy of the people, that almost always turns into a political murder. Vladimir Putin, at a minimum, has to take some political responsibility for it [the murder].”
Russian Activists Vow to Publish Nemtsov’s Proofs of Russia Lies
A top political nemesis of Vladimir Putin and the leader of Russian opposition, Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered on February 27, was preparing to publish a report to prove that the Kremlin was lying about its role in the eastern Ukraine, particularly about the presence of Russian soldiers.
Russian opposition activists say they will publish those documents gathered by Boris Nemtsov that purport to prove Russia’s direct military role in Ukraine.
According to his close ally, Ilya Yashin, Nemtsov wanted to publish the report in March. “He said that he had received clues which proved the presence of Russian soldiers in the territory affected by Ukraine’s armed conflict and I specifically remember that he was communicating with the parents of dead soldiers from the cities of Ivanovo, Yaroslavl and another town which, unfortunately, I do not remember,” Yashin told Gazeta, the Russian newspaper.
“He was talking about planning a visit to Ivanovo. He was planning on collecting materials and compiling them in a kind of report. Sadly I do not know the details as, obviously, if he had any documents in his possession, then they have been seized by the investigators who immediately went to his apartment and office and took his computer,” Yashin added.
“I have some ideas how to pick up the pieces of his report, but this is not something that can be done in a few days,” Yashin told The Times of London. It was believed that the report had been completely lost when Russian law enforcement officers seized Nemtsov’s computer as part of the investigation.
A trusted associate of Nemtsov, Olga Shorina, told Reuters that Nemtsov suspected that intelligence services had bugged his office. “He didn’t want to say it out loud, that’s why he wrote it down for me,” she said.
Ilya Yashin and Olga Shorina hope to put Nemtsov’s reports together and publish them posthumously within a month. According to them, the information will be entitled “Putin and the war.”
It was the most high-profile political murder of an opposition figure in Putin’s 15 years in power.
Vladimir Putin called the death of Boris Nemtsov a shameful tragedy, denied any Kremlin involvement, and promised to personally monitor the investigation of the murder.
Meanwhile, Russian investigators claim that the killing could have been a provocation to discredit the Kremlin and Putin.
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko who awarded Boris Nemtsov with Ukraine’s Order of Freedom posthumously for serving as “a bridge between Ukraine and Russia”, believes that whoever was afraid of what Nemtsov was preparing to publish as evidence, was the one behind the murder.
A week after Nemtsov’s murder, mourners still pay tribute and bring flowers to the bridge near the Kremlin where the opposition leader was shot dead.
On the night of February 28, Boris Nemtsov, a famous anti-Putin critic, was walking on a bridge across the Moscow River just outside the Kremlin with his girlfriend Anna Duritskaya, a Ukrainian model, when a killer drove up in a white vehicle and shot Nemtsov in the chest four times.
