Turkey, Russia exchange Chechen prisoners for Tatars
It has emerged that two Russian agents jailed in Turkey in connection with the deaths of Chechen dissidents were extradited to Russia as part of a prisoner swap enabled by Turkey's legal state of emergency.
Abdulwahid Edelgiriev was about to take his niece shopping in an Istanbul suburb in November 2015 when a car blocked his path. A man leapt out of it and took aim at the Chechen separatist fighter and missed. As Edelgiriev fled, his assailants gunned him down, stabbed him in the neck and left him to bleed to death.
Nearly five months later, on April 8, 2016, two Russian agents were arrested in Istanbul and jailed for their alleged role in Edelgiriev’s murder and in the deaths of seven other Chechen dissidents living in Turkey. The pair carried fake documents identifying them as Alexander Smirnov and Yury Animisov. Moscow’s Rosbalt news agency reported at the time that Smirnov’s real name was Valid Lurakhmaev. He belonged to a Chechen mafia group in Moscow in the 1990s and his specialty was hit jobs.
