Dagestan - journalists murdered on a "black hit list&qu

[K. A. Pital]

Journalists murdered according to a "black hit list"

People in Dagestan believe the murder of two local TV workers are not a coincidence.

I entered Mahachkala by darkness, but there were fires burning in the streets.

- No heating, eh? - I asked the driver.
- No, that's a tradition. Today is the celebration of Navuz Bairam - the day of spring equinox in russian.

The celebration is on 22 of March. But this year it was moved one day due to mourning. A day before two respected and well-known journalists were murdered - a correspondent of the "Channel 1" Ilyas Shurpaev and the head of GTRK "Dagestan" Gadji Abashilov. Ilyas was murdered in his rent flat in Moscow. He moved from Mahachkala just a few months ago: "He often said that in Dagestan the professional limits are strangling him, - his colleagues told. - Moscow rarely ordered reports from here. So he decided to move to the capital".

- Believe me, the whole city was stunned, - the driver tells. - Ilyas was kind of like our pride, a public face of Dagestan. People tell he dug out something important and shared it with Abashilov. And so they both were offed.

The head of the local GTRK was killed in a Mahachkala district "Uzbek town" (the homes were built by Uzbeks in Soviet times), on Friday evening. Gadji Abashilov went out of the supermarket with five food bags. This very moment, he was strafed by automatic fire. The investigators found over 20 gun marks on his car. He died before the medics arrived.

- The bandits drove a Zhiguli 99 model, - a manager of a computer store, Andrey Getseu, who witnessed the shooting told. - A patrol car chased them.

The chase lasted 15 minutes with shooting on tires, but the criminals managed to lose the police.

- Actually Ilyas was a client of mine, - Andrey recalls. - Just before he went to Moscow I sold him a notebook, Acer. Not too fancy, around 25 thousand roubles.

This notebook, found in the Moscow flat, didn't interest the murderers. Neither did his money or credit cards. So the robbery version was excluded instantly. Especially given that Shurpaev himself asked the housemaster to let two caucasians into his house on that fateful night. They are the main suspects now.

- It looks more like a common murder, - said a source in Dagestan MVD. - So far we don't explicitly connect it with Gadji Abashilov's murder, who was quite certainly killed due to his professional duties.

ut many in Machachkala don't believe those two murders just coincided. Recently Ilyas Shurpaev put up a note in his blog about a "black list" of journalists in Dagestan, where his surname was on the first place. Abashilov was also in the same list.

The black list was reprinted in a Dagestan newspaper "Real times" during a scandal between the journalist collective and the business owners of the newspaper. According to journalists, the CEO of the newspaper Rizvan Rizvanov forbid mentioning the names of some people in the newspaper.

- There was no written order of course, - shared a newspaper worker. - But we were told clearly that even for a mention of people from "the list" we will be held accountable. The "list" included Ilyas Shurpaev, Alik Abdulgamidob, Gadji Abashilov, local journalists Viktor Chigirik, Haji Murat Donogo, Anatoli Korkmasov, Oleg Sanaev, and sculptors Sharif Shahmarjanov and the Office of Public Procurators official Tofik Ashurbekov. The chief editor of the newspaper refused to follow our CEOs orders and resigned. Could you imagine what a shock we had when two people from the "black hit list" were killed on a single day.

- Please do not rush to conclusions, - the local Prosecutor Office recommended. - We are informed of the list and we will check on possible ties with murders. However, today it's not the main piece of evidence for the investigation.

[Sidewinder]

So... the CEOs of certain media companies ordered the deaths of some journalists for refusing to submit to their demands?

If not, what do you think is the motive for the journalists' murders?

[K. A. Pital]

Government officials are routinely murdered in Dagestan (including Prosecutor General of Dagestan, IIRC). Perhaps those people shed too much light on who might be doing it, and thus ended up on a hit list themselves.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

So.. muslim extremists or Government hitmen, or mafia or some private dispute?

[irishmick79]

Government officials are routinely murdered in Dagestan (including Prosecutor General of Dagestan, IIRC). Perhaps those people shed too much light on who might be doing it, and thus ended up on a hit list themselves.

My suspicions as well - this would especially be logical if the journalists uncovered some level of government complicity in some of the cases. Perhaps Shurpaev moved to Moscow so he could follow up some leads suggesting this end.