DOHA, 7 March 2004 — Qatar is preparing to try two Russian secret agents for the February murder of former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Doha despite repeated demands by Moscow that they be freed, a Qatari official said yesterday.
“The file of the two Russian secret agents has been referred to court but the trial has not started yet,” said the official on condition of anonymity. “It will be up to the court to decide on the trial date.”
Russian Ambassador Victor Kudryavtsev said he was not aware of this development. “We have not received any notice to take part in a trial and neither have their lawyers.”
In what has escalated into a diplomatic row between the emirate and Russia, Qatar expelled the first secretary of the Russian Embassy last month after detaining him and the agents in connection with the murder of Yandarbiyev in a car bomb on Feb. 13.
The Russian government has demanded that Qatar free the two Russian agents saying they had nothing to do with Yandarbiyev’s murder and that they had been posted to the Russian Embassy to help in the “fight against terrorism”, in particular terror financing.
Moscow’s SVR foreign intelligence service has said it had nothing to do with the death of Yandarbiyev, who briefly headed Russia’s war-torn separatist republic of Chechnya in the mid-1990s.
Yandarbiyev, who had lived in Qatar for nearly three years with his family despite a Russian extradition request, was accused of raising funds for Chechen rebels in the Muslim world.
