Germany charges Russian man with planned hit on Chechen dissident

A Russian man has been charged in Germany with planning the killing of a dissident from Russia’s Chechen Republic, according to German prosecutors.

Federal prosecutors said in a statement published on Thursday that Valid D, whose last name was not released for privacy reasons, was alleged in early 2000 to have accepted an order from a member of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov‘s security apparatus to kill an opposition member living in exile in Germany.

Prosecutors said the designated victim and his brother were critics of Kadyrov and vocally speak out for an independent Chechnya on social media.

The actual killing was to be carried out by another man, who pretended to accept the hit job for fear of repression, prosecutors said.

The suspect was alleged to have obtained a firearm, ammunition and a silencer, and travelled to Germany in the second half of 2020 to receive and assist the other man in preparing the killing, according to the statement.

Valid D was arrested on January 1, 2021, before the killing could take place. He has been imprisoned since.

Last year, a Berlin court sentenced a Russian man, 56-year-old Vadim Krasikov, to life in prison for killing a Chechen man from Georgia in the German capital in 2019 at the behest of the Russian government.

The murder of Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, a 40-year-old ethnic Chechen of Georgian nationality, sparked outrage in Germany and inflamed diplomatic tensions between Berlin and Moscow.