Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov personally ordered the killing of his two powerful rivals Ruslan and Sulim Yamadayev and offered $1 million for shooting their younger brother Isa, Isa's former bodyguard said.
Kadyrov denied the claim.
Ex-bodyguard Khavazhi Yusupov made the accusations while speaking to investigators probing an apparent attempt to kill Isa Yamadayev in his Moscow apartment last July, Moskovsky Komsomolyets reported Wednesday.
During questioning, a video of which was posted on the paper's web site, Yusupov explains that he was brought to Kadyrov's residence in the village of Tsentoroi, Chechnya, earlier in July.
Kadyrov boasted that Ruslan and Sulim Yamadayev were killed "by my personal order … and I will kill their family," Yusupov said.
Yusupov said Kadyrov ordered him to shoot Isa and that a Kadyrov aide in Moscow handed him a PSS pistol with a silencer. He said Kadyrov threatened to kill his family if he did not obey.
He went on to say that he visited Isa in his apartment, went into the kitchen to drink some water and then shot at the host in the hallway. "But I missed, and Isa overpowered me and took the gun," he said.
The July 28 incident has been shrouded in mystery. Police initially denied any attack after Isa Yamadayev first mentioned it in an interview with the Rosbalt news agency.
The Investigative Committee said July 29 that a suspect accused of shooting at Isa had been detained on suspicion of an attempted contract killing.
The Kadyrovs and the Yamadayevs once commanded pro-Moscow forces in eastern Chechnya, but the two clans had a falling out.
Former State Duma Deputy Ruslan Yamadayev was killed in an apparent contract hit on a central Moscow street in September 2008. His elder brother Sulim was shot in Dubai the following March.
Isa, who is one of three surviving brothers, has long accused Kadyrov of masterminding the attacks.
He also maintains that Sulim is alive, but Dubai authorities have denied this. A local court last week handed down life sentences to two suspects, one of whom is Kadyrov's former horse trainer. Dubai police have accused Duma Deputy Adam Delimkhanov, a cousin of Kadyrov, of plotting Sulim's death.
Kadyrov called the revelations a new provocation in an old story.
"Khavazhi Yusupov was never in Ramzan Kadyrov's house, never drove with him in a car and never could have discussed any matters regarding the Yamadayevs with him," he said in a statement released on his web site Wednesday.
The statement also voiced doubt about the video's authenticity, saying nobody appeared in it but Yusupov and that it was unclear where it had been recorded.
In an open letter published together with the video, Isa Yamadayev said he had obtained the footage legally from the Investigative Committee.
A committee spokeswoman refused to comment on the footage's authenticity on Wednesday. But Pavel Gusev, the editor of Moskovsky Komsomolyets, said a law enforcement source had confirmed that a video was made of Yusupov's questioning. "This does not prove that the Chechen president did this," Gusev told the Rbc.ru news service.
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