Russian officials denied on Sunday that former Chechen warlord Salman Raduyev, found dead in a jail where he was serving a life sentence, had been beaten to death.
Raduyev, 35, convicted for taking more than 2 000 people hostage in 1996, died on Saturday in a high-security prison in the Perm region of the Urals after internal haemorrhaging, officials said.
His remains will not be returned to his family, a source said. ”We are currently seeking to establish the cause of death,” said Deputy Justice Minister Yury Kalinin.
But he denied the prisoner had been beaten to death. ”Nobody touched him, not a finger was laid on him,” the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Kalinin as saying. ”The health ministry forensic specialist can testify to that.”
Chechnya’s separatist presidency accused the Russian authorities of killing Raduyev. ”The moratorium on the death penalty does not exist for Chechens,” a representative for the presidency told AFP by telephone.
He said if another leading Chechen separatist, Akhmed Zakeyev, is extradited from Britain to Russia as Moscow is demanding, he would meet the same fate.
Raduyev was given a life sentence last December for the hostage taking at a hospital in Kizlyar in Dagestan, next to the breakaway southern Russian republic of Chechnya.
The episode ended in a bloodbath with 78 dead in a shootout with Russian federal forces at Pervomayskoye on the Chechnya-Dagestan border.
The hostage-takers, who broke through to safety in Chechnya, released their prisoners. Raduyev’s defence was that his aim had been to force Russia to sue for peace in Chechnya.
Kalinin said Raduyev’s death appeared to be due to ”the many complaints he suffered from.”
It had followed internal haemorrhaging and the body had shown no marks of violence. The justice ministry press department said Raduyev, a Muslim, had become weaker during the fasting period of Ramadan which ended on December 5.
”Perhaps Raduyev did not estimate his strength properly,” ITAR-Tass quoted press chief Boris Kalyagin as saying. The body would not be returned to the family, ”but will be buried in accordance with regulations in force,” a justice ministry source was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying.
”There is no legal reason for handing over the body to his family,” the source was quoted as saying. Neither had the family made any immediate request, the source said.
The former warlord was captured by Russian federal state security agents in 2000 and convicted by a court in Dagestan.
He was serving his sentence in penal colony Number 14 at Solikamsk in the Perm region. Raduyev was the first Chechen warlord to be convicted in Russia since resumption of hostilities in 1999 between Russian federal forces and Chechen separatists.
Badly wounded in the head during an assassination attempt two months after the Kizlyar incident, Raduyev barely survived and underwent extensive plastic surgery abroad to rebuild his face.
A prominent field commander during the 1994-96 Chechen war, he played little part in the second conflict. A court declared him sound of mind but a psychiatrist who treated him between 1997 and 1999 said Raduyev suffered from manic paranoia symptoms.
In August 1996 Russia signed a peace deal with the Chechen separatists, agreeing to withdrawal of its forces.
Russian troops returned in October 1999 and are still engaged in putting down a separatist insurgency. – Sapa-AFP