An alleged professional killer linked to Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov was severely wounded and is now in hospital under police guard after a failed assassination attempt in Kyiv on June 1.
The attempt on the life of Adam Osmayev, an ethnic Chechen and Russian citizen living in Ukraine, happened at 5 p.m. in the historic Kyiv district of Podil. According to police reports, the attack occurred after Osmayev and his wife, Amina Okueva, met with a person who identified himself as Alex Verner, a journalist with French newspaper Le Monde.
Osmayev and Okueva served in Ukraine’s volunteer Kyiv 2 Battalion, later affiliated with Ukraine’s National Police forces, defending Ukraine against the Russian invasion of the country’s east. They also had connections to the Dzhokhar Dudayev International Peacekeeping Battalion, a combat unit formed by ethnic Chechens to fight Kremlin forces in the Donbas.
In Russia, Osmayev is wanted for allegedly attempting to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ukraine in 2014 refused a Russian request to extradite him.
The person going by the name Verner had previously met the couple three times for interviews, and had been vouched for by other journalists.
During their conversation inside a Nissan Terrano car, the man asked the couple to move to the back seat for a photo. Saying that he had a present for them, he then took a Glock pistol out of a gift box and shot Osmayev.
Okueva, who was sitting next to her husband, immediately fired four shots at the attacker from her own Makarov pistol. Both the attacker and Osmayev were hospitalized in critical condition.
At the crime scene, police found documents identifying the assassin as Oleksandr Dakar, a Ukrainian national born in 1958, according to the Interior Ministry advisor Anton Herashenko.
“The police and special services are now looking into whether this person really exists, and his story,” Herashenko wrote on his Facebook page on June 1. “We’ve already established that he got his Ukrainian domestic passport on Feb. 10, 2016, his foreign passport on Feb. 15, 2016, and his taxpayer number on Feb. 11, 2016.”
The gunman’s passport has stamps indicating multiple crossings of the Russian and Belarussian border, with his last trip to Russia being made in mid-May, Herashenko wrote. He speculated that the gunman had been sent to Ukraine by the Russian secret services, using forged documents.
Both the attacker and his victim Osmayev underwent surgery on June 2 and are in critical condition at Kyiv’s Hospital No. 17, a surgeon at the hospital, Dmytro Myasnikov, told Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform.
Another Ukrainian official said Moscow was clearly to blame for the attempted assassination.
“Even a brief glance of the available documents makes it very clear – the assassination attempt was inspired by Moscow,” Interior Ministry advisor Ivan Marchenko wrote on his Facebook page on June 2. “The killer has every chance of recovering, and becoming a unique witness to reveal the secrets of the Putin regime’s conspiracy against Ukraine. The number one task for the police and the SBU now is to not to let him die.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian investigative website Censor.net said that using information from Russian news outlet Fontanka it had identified the gunman as Artur Krinari, a Russian citizen, born in Gudermes in Chechnya, who was a Saint Petersburg gangster widely known in the 1990s.
Fontanka, in a 2011 report, said that Krinari went by the nickname Dingo and used many surnames, such as Kurmakaev, Denisultanov, Tischenko and Tsebro. In Russia, he had been charged and imprisoned for crimes including fraud, forgery, kidnapping, theft, and attacking police.
In 2009, he was interrogated by Austrian police investigating the murder of Umar Israilov, a former Chechen fighter and bodyguard of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who was murdered in Vienna in January 2009, according to RusPres, a Russian news agency. Despite asking for asylum in the EU in exchange for his testimony, Krinari was expelled to Moscow and later retracted his evidence, the agency said.
According to a New York Times report from Jan. 14, 2009, Krinari, under the name of Artur Kurmakaev, told Austrian police he worked for a secretive department under Kadyrov charged with repatriating Chechens in exile. He also said that Kadyrov had a list of 5,000 Chechens living abroad who had been disloyal to the Chechen leader. Of these, 300 were to be killed, with 50 of them living in Austria, Kurmakaev told Austrian police, according to the NYT report.
Meanwhile, Okueva told Ukraine’s LB news outlet that she was sure that her husband’s assassination had been ordered by Kadyrov and Putin, and that it had been organized by the Russian secret services. She also claimed that the attacker was connected to the murders of other Chechens who were enemies of Kadyrov.
“The killer turned out to be a tricky guy,” she told LB. “He has a lot of murders of Chechens on his conscience, including ones committed in Europe.”
