Oppositional Chechen blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov, who has repeatedly criticized the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov and the authorities, stopped communicating in Sweden, where he received political asylum in 2021. Human rights activists and journalists have not been able to contact him for the third day, and Telegram channels are spreading information about the blogger's murder. The Agency drew attention to publications in the media.
For the first time, reports about the murder of Abdurakhmanov appeared on the Telegram channel “Ichkeria: Heroes, Enemies and Traitors” on December 1.
The authors of the channel clarified that the sources that transmitted the information are unofficial, and the level of trust in them is low. The publication also says that Abdurakhmanova's neighbor heard the shots, which she reported on her Instagram page. On the same day, a video appeared on the pro-Russian Telegram channel Kavkaz Front showing a man being hospitalized with bullet wounds. The caption under the video says that Abdurakhmanov was killed. The pro-Kremlin telegram channel Rybar also claims that Abdurakhmanov “appears to have been killed.”
The Chechen human rights organization VAYFOND, in turn, reports that the representative of the organization, Mokhmad Abdurakhmanov, who is Tumso's brother, has also stopped communicating. However, the channel has no information about the murder of the blogger.
The press secretary of the Assembly of Chechens of Europe Shamil Albakov told the Kavkazsky Knot publication that it might be about the murder of a man who lived next door to Abdurakhmanov, this information was also not confirmed.
Last December, Abdurakhmanov said that nine of his relatives had been kidnapped in Chechnya. Before that, in September, about 30 armed men came to Abdurakhmanov's relatives and threatened to declare "blood feud" on them if the blogger did not stop criticizing the authorities of the republic. There was already an assassination attempt on him in February 2020, the attack took place in his apartment in Sweden, but Abdurakhmanov managed to disarm the attacker and call the police. Then the customers were not found, the prosecutor said at the meeting that he suspects the connection of the attackers with the leadership of Chechnya. In the mid-2010s, the oppositionist left Russia due to a conflict with Kadyrov's relatives, and in 2021 he received political asylum in Sweden.
Over the past few years, several of Kadyrov's critics have died during assassination attempts in European countries, including blogger Mamikhan Umarov, Mansur Stary (Imran Aliyev), and former Ichkerian platoon commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, for whose murder a former FSB officer was convicted.