Chechen opposition bloggers Tumso Abdurakhmanov and Khasan Khalitov received hundreds of thousands of dollars from killers working for Ramzan Kadyrov for simulating their own deaths. This was reported by the Chechen human rights project 1ADAT.
1ADAT founder Ibragim Yangulbaev said that in early December, the project received a request for assistance from a certain Bashir Albogachiev. He introduced himself as a fighter against the Russian occupation, who previously collaborated with Doku Umarov and is now trying to destroy Kadyrov's power from within. Bashir told human rights activists that his relatives were being held hostage at Kadyrov's residence. According to him, they were supposed to kill Abdurakhmanov, but did not do this, making a deal with the blogger himself. According to her, the killers paid Abdurakhmanov $1.1 million to simulate their own death. To complete the deal, the Kadyrovites asked the blogger to have his brother confirm his death. It was because of the lack of evidence that they were allegedly kept in the residence. Bashir told 1ADAT that Abdurakhmanov refused to confirm the death through his brother. Kadyrovets asked human rights activists to do this. He offered money to Yangulbaev for publishing a "confirmation" in the project's channel, but he refused.
Some time later, Bashir wrote 1ADAT again. This time he began to tell human rights activists all the details of the story. He also said that a similar deal was made with another opposition blogger, Khasan Khalitov. In October, he was allegedly poisoned in a migration prison in Turkey. As evidence, the Kadyrovites filmed a staged video of his body in the prison hospital. For imitation of his own death, Khalitov received $600,000. According to Bashir, he also helped the Kadyrovites get in touch with Abdurakhmanov.
According to the plan to "murder" the blogger, Kadyrov's killers allegedly tracked down his place of residence in Sweden. As evidence, they filmed a staged video where Abdurakhmanov throws out the garbage. For this video, he received $ 50 thousand. After Kadyrov received this video, he ordered Abdurakhmanov to be killed. The killers asked the blogger to make a video of the moment of his own "murder", for which he demanded another $100,000. Both videos are shown in the 1ADAT investigation.
According to Bashir, the killers agreed that Abdurakhmanov would disappear for a month and a half. However, as Ibragimov emphasizes, as a result, the blogger did not appear on the radar for three months. After that, he made a video disproving the fact of his death. Two months have passed since the release of the video at the time of writing the news. According to Ibragimov, Abdurakhmanov has not yet returned to human rights activities.
After the publication of the 1ADAT investigation, Abdurkhmanov told his version of what happened. According to him, at the end of 2022 he was contacted by “a certain person” who said that he had received a “very large order”. The killers allegedly got in touch with Abdurakhmanov's interlocutor and asked him for help:
“And he suggests that I “throw” them all, deceive them by filming a staged video of my murder. To be honest, I was somewhat skeptical about this proposal. I did not believe in the success of this adventure, because almost immediately they agreed on the condition that they could not poison me, they should just shoot me, arrange a shootout in a European country, declare that I died there. Naturally, neither the police, nor the authorities, no one will confirm this, because in fact there is no shootout, no one died.
According to Abdurakhmanov, the people who were sent the video to pass on to those who ordered the murder were convinced of its authenticity. Despite this, the customers themselves did not believe that the video was real. They tried to get “confirmation” from Abdurakhmanov through his relatives. However, according to him, at the very beginning of the deal, he “immediately set the condition that I would not tell a word of lies. Neither me nor my relatives. After that, the Kadyrovites came up with a version according to which Abdurakhmanov shot one of the perpetrators of the "murder" in response. They showed the customer a video of the wounded man, after which they were finally able to close the deal.
Despite this, says Abdurakhmanov, customers continued to doubt that the blogger had really been killed. Then the killers asked him to record a video in which he allegedly lies in a hospital in a coma. This gave them the opportunity to say that they had done their part of the work, and that Abdurakhmanov did not die an immediate death was not their fault. Abdurakhmanov shot such a video and sent it to the performers.