Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, denied on Friday he was behind the murder this week of a leading Russian human rights activist, Natalya Estemirova.
Kadyrov telephoned Oleg Orlov, head of the respected rights organisation Memorial that Estemirova worked for, and bluntly rejected Orlov's public assertion that Kadyrov bore responsibility for the activist's murder.
"You are not a prosecutor or a judge therefore your claims about my guilt are not ethical, to put it mildly, and are insulting to me," Kadyrov told Orlov, according to an account of the conversation posted on Kadyrov's website.
"I am sure that you have to think about my rights before declaring for everyone to hear that I am guilty of Estemirova's death," the Kremlin-backed Chechen strongman said.
In his conversation with Orlov, Kadyrov said he stressed that he was not only the president but also "head of a family, father to seven children and son of a woman who lost her spouse in the fight against terror and Wahhabism."
Kadyrov's father and ex-president of Chechnya, Akhmad Kadyrov, was assassinated in a bomb attack in 2004.
Human rights activists, Orlov in particular, said that regardless of who actually pulled the trigger it was Kadyrov, 32, who was to blame for the attack, the third murder of a Russian activist or journalist on President Dmitry Medvedev's watch.
"I know, I am sure who is guilty of Natalya Estemirova's murder, we all know him -- his name is Ramzan Kadyrov," Orlov said in a statement released following Estemirova's abduction in Chechnya and murder on Wednesday.
Kadyrov acknowledged that his personal non-involvement in the crime did not absolve him of his political responsibility to track down and punish the murderers, the statement on his website said.
Echoing Medvedev's comments in Munich on Thursday, Kadyrov said the murder was another provocation meant to cast a shadow on his volatile region.
Kadyrov is a hugely controversial figure, praised by the Kremlin for restoring some stability to Chechnya but hated by rights activists, who accuse him of letting a personal militia carry out kidnappings and torture.
In April, Russia ended its controversial "anti-terror operation" in Chechnya, a move that analysts said gave the maverick leader a freer hand in running his war-ravaged region.
Source: AFP Global Edition
