Aid worker, husband killed in Chechnya

A CHARITY worker in Chechnya has been murdered along with her husband, just a month after the killing of a leading human rights activist cast doubts on Russian claims that normal life is returning to the war-ravaged region.

The bullet-riddled bodies of Zarema Sadulayeva and husband, Alik Dzhabrailov, were found stuffed in the boot of a car hours after they were abducted from the office of her charity, Saving the Generation, which helps children injured and traumatised by 15 years of violence in Chechnya.

“This is just unimaginable. They killed a young woman, she was probably 25, and her husband, who was about the same age. They had just got married,” said Ludmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki rights group.

Their deaths came a month after the murder of renowned human rights worker Natalya Estemirova, whose colleagues at advocacy group Memorial blamed Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov for her death.

Mr Kadyrov denies any involvement in the killings, which have focused world attention on a tiny republic in southern Russia that was devastated by two wars in the 1990s between Kremlin troops and separatist rebels.

Moscow insists that anti-terrorist operations are now over and Mr Kadyrov and his henchmen are in full control of Chechnya, but the spate of high-profile murders and spiralling violence in neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia have sent shockwaves through the Caucasus.

“It is a cynical and inhuman murder. I see it as a challenge to society, an attempt to strike fear into every inhabitant of Chechnya,” said Mr Kadyrov, several of whose critics and enemies have been killed in Russia and abroad in recent years.

He issued a similar statement after the murder of the award-winning Ms Estemirova, but this weekend denounced her as someone who was “without honour, dignity or conscience”.

Politicians and security personnel are coming under increasing attack across Russia’s North Caucasus, as federal forces struggle to subdue violent separatist, radical Islamic and criminal groups.

Journalists are also a regular target, and a reporter was shot dead in Dagestan yesterday.