DOHA, 14 February 2004 — Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a former Chechen president, was assassinated in an explosion that destroyed his car yesterday, an official here said.
Yandarbiyev’s teenage son was critically wounded in the blast, which occurred as he and his father were driving away from a mosque where they had performed Friday prayers, said an Interior Ministry official and a local hospital.
Yandarbiyev, who was acting president of Chechnya in 1996-97, had been linked to the Al-Qaeda terror group. Russia had been seeking his extradition from Qatar, where he lived for at least three years, accusing him of ties to kidnappers and international terrorists.
“We are collecting evidence in order to reach the perpetrators,” Qatar’s chief of security, Mubarak Al-Nasr, told the pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera, which is based in the country.
Al-Jazeera and fellow Arabic satellite channel Al-Arabiya reported that two people were killed in the explosion. But the Interior Ministry did not confirm this.
An Interior Ministry official said the explosion at 12:45 p.m. (0945 GMT) killed Yandarbiyev and injured his 13-year-old son, the official Qatar News Agency reported.
A doctor at Hamad General Hospital told reporters that Yandarbiyev died on his way to the hospital. The doctor said Yandarbiyev’s son was in critical condition.
The doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the father and son were the only casualties brought to the Hamad General Hospital. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. Such explosions are almost unheard of in Qatar, a quiet state with tight security.
Last year, the United Nations put Yandarbiyev on a list of people with alleged links to the Al-Qaeda terrorist group that is blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The US government also put Yandarbiyev on a list of international terrorists who are subject to financial sanctions.
Yandarbiyev was considered a key link in the Chechen rebels’ finance network, channeling funds from abroad.
He himself had denied that the Chechen rebels had ties to Al-Qaeda.
“Yandarbiyev was the main ideologue of the separatists, and therefore of the terrorist organizations bringing Chechnya to such severe consequences,” said the president of the Moscow-backed Chechen government, Akhmad Kadyrov. “He is guilty of everything that has happened,” Kadyrov said, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.
The Russian Embassy in Doha had no immediate comment on the killing.
Boris Labusov, a spokesman for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, a successor to the KGB, said his agency had nothing to do with Yandarbiyev’s death.
— Additional input from agencies
