The Suspect in Russian Politician’s Killing Blows Himself Up, Report Says

Zaur Dadayev, arrested in the slaying of the Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov, looks out from a defendants’ cage inside a court building in Moscow on Sunday.CreditTatyana Makeyeva/Reuters

MOSCOW — A suspect in the murder of the opposition politician Boris Y. Nemtsov blew himself up as the police closed in on him overnight, Russian news reports said on Sunday, while new disclosures indicated that one of the men already detained in the killing had served as a police officer in the fight against Islamic insurgents.

Five suspects were due to be arraigned at Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, said in a statement. Security forces established a cordon around the court.

The two prime suspects, whose names have been officially confirmed, are Zaur Dadayev and Anzar Kubashev, whose arrest was announced on Saturday. There was no announcement from law enforcement agencies confirming the names of the other three suspects although details of further detentions emerged overnight.

Mourners on Saturday at the site where the Russian opposition figure Boris Y. Nemtsov was shot and killed in February in Moscow.2 Suspects Are Detained in Killing of Kremlin CriticMARCH 7, 2015
The arrests and the police activity were centered in the Northern Caucasus, long a trouble spot for Russia, but there was still no coherent picture of the case from Russia’s law enforcement agencies as scattershot details emerged.

The main question many Russians want answered is who ordered the brazen assassination of Mr. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, in central Moscow on Feb. 27, the first killing of a such an important political figure in many years. Given the fact that the shooting took place within sight of the Kremlin, among the most heavily guarded sites in Moscow, opposition figures have accused the government of complicity in the crime, which it has denied.

Mr. Nemtsov was one of the government’s most persistent critics and was due to publish a report that he said would reveal the involvement of the Russian military in the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin has called Russians fighting in Ukraine “volunteers.”

Mr. Nemtsov was killed while walking across a bridge over the Moscow River with his girlfriend, who was not injured. He was shot in the back four times by a gunman who then escaped in a car driven by an accomplice.

In the North Caucasus, the acting head of the Security Council in Ingushetia, Albert Barakhoev, was quoted by the state-run news agencies, Tass and RIA Novosti, as saying that two other men were in police custody, with all four arrests having taken place there. The two other men were Shagid Kubashev, the younger brother of Anzar, and a man described as having been in a car with Mr. Dadayev at the time of his arrest.

All the men detained so far were Chechens, the reports said. In Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, which borders Ingushetia, one suspect blew himself up with a grenade after tossing another one at law enforcement officials outside his apartment who were demanding that he surrender, Interfax reported. No one else was injured in the blasts, the report said.

Mr. Barakhoev revealed some new information about the suspects, including the fact that Mr. Dadayev had worked as a law enforcement officer, serving as deputy commander of a battalion of Interior Ministry troops assigned to fight Islamist insurgents. It was unclear whether he was still with the unit.

The other main suspect, Mr. Kubashev, had worked for a private security company in Moscow as a guard in a hypermarket, according to Mr. Barakhoev. Both are between 30 and 35 years old, he said.

Ajmani Dadayev, the mother of Mr. Dadayev, told state television that the Kubashev brothers were her nephews. The suspects had worked in Moscow for years without any problems, she said.

As of midday Sunday, there had been no official police announcement about further arrests or the Grozny incident.

There have been a series of high-profile murders of government critics in Russia over the past two decades in which the mastermind was never identified.

Last June, for example, Moscow’s highest criminal court sentenced five men, all from the North Caucasus, to prison for the 2006 murder of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. But her supporters stress that the question of who ordered her killing remains open.

Ms. Politkovskaya was a scathing critic of Kremlin policies in Chechnya and of the local strongman, Ramzan A. Kadyrov.

After two wars in the 1990s, which leveled Grozny, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia essentially subcontracted control over Chechnya to Mr. Kadyrov.

In recent weeks, Mr. Kadyrov and his supporters have assumed a highly visible role in the movement that seeks to block any attempt to recreate in Russia the kind of political upheaval that forced a change in government in neighboring Ukraine. More broadly, these figures support the conservative, nationalistic, anti-Western ideology that Mr. Putin has made a signature of his third term.