Death
On February 13, 2004, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was killed when a bomb ripped through his SUV in the Qatari capital, Doha. Yandarbiyev was seriously wounded and died in hospital. His 13-year old son Daud was seriously injured. Some, but not all, reports said two of his bodyguards were killed, but this has not been confirmed.
It was initially unclear who was responsible for the blast, but suspicion fell on SVR and/or GRU, Russian intelligence agencies denying any involvement, or internal feuding among the Chechen rebel leadership. Aslan Maskhadov's separatist foreign ministry condemned the attack as a "Russian terrorist attack", comparing it to the 1996 attack that killed Dzhokhar Dudayev. The car bomb eventually led to Qatar's first counter-terrorism law, declaring lethal terrorist acts punishable by death or life imprisonment.
The day after the attack, Qatari authorities arrested three Russians in a Russian embassy villa. One of them, the first secretary of the Russian Embassy in Qatar, Aleksandr Fetisov, was released in March due to his diplomatic status and the remaining two, the GRU agents Anatoly Yablochkov (also known as Belashkov) and Vasily Pugachyov (sometimes misspelled as Bogachyov), were charged with the assassination of Yandarbiyev, an assassination attempt of his son Daud Yandarbiyev, and smuggling weapons into Qatar. According to Moscow, Yablochkov and Pugachyov were secret intelligence agents sent to the Russian Embassy in Doha to collect information about global terrorism. Russia’s acting Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov pledged state support to the suspects and declared that their imprisonment was illegal. There were some speculations that Fetisov had been released in exchange for Qatari wrestlers detained in Moscow.
The trial proceedings were closed to the public after the defendants claimed that the Qatari police had tortured them in the first days after their arrest, when they had been held incommunicado; the two Russians alleged that they had suffered beatings, sleep deprivation and attacks by guard dogs. Based on these torture allegations and the fact that the two officers were arrested within an extraterritorial compound belonging to the Russian Embassy, Russia demanded the immediate release of its citizens; they were represented by the attorney of the law firm founded by Nikolai Yegorov, a friend and fellow student of Vladimir Putin at Leningrad State University. The Qatari prosecutors concluded that the suspects had received the order to eliminate Zelimkhan Yandarbiev from Sergei Ivanov personally.
On June 30, 2004, both Russians were sentenced to life imprisonment; passing the sentence, the judge stated that they had acted on orders from the Russian leadership.
The verdict of the Doha court caused severe tensions between Qatar and Russia, and on December 23, 2004, Qatar agreed to extradite the prisoners to Russia, where they would serve out their life sentences. The agents however received a heroes' welcome on returning to Moscow in January 2005 but disappeared from public view shortly afterwards. The Russian prison authorities admitted in February 2005 that they were not in jail, but said that a sentence handed down in Qatar was "irrelevant" in Russia.
Read more about this topic: Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev
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