Sulim Yamadayev

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Sulim Yamadayev : biography

21 June 1973 – 30 March 2009

A few days after he was declared wanted in Russia, Gazeta reported that Yamadayev was participating in military actions in the outskirts of Tskhinvali in the Georgia’s breakway Republic of South Ossetia. Novaya Gazeta military correspondent Arkady Babchenko accompanied Yamadayev and his remaining loyal men in Georgia. , Novaya Gazeta, 13 August 2008 Following the war, on 22 August, RIA Novosti reported Yamadayev was officially dismissed from his post as commander of the Vostok battalion in Chechnya., RIA Novosti, 22 August 2008 On the same day, the search for Yamadayev was stopped, officially because the Chechen MVD had established his whereabouts (according to investigatory bodies, Yamadayev was in Moscow)., Memorial, 22 August 2008

On 24 September 2008, Ruslan Yamadayev and a retired Russian army General Sergey Kizyun (protector of the Yamadayev clan) were shot in Sulim’s car in the central Moscow while driving from the Kremlin; Ruslan Yamadayev was fatally wounded. Initial press responses reported the name of the victim as "Sulim Yamadayev"; this was corrected later. , Kommersant, 24 September 2008 Sulim Yamadayev blamed Kadyrov and vowed to avenge the death of his brother., Memorial, 24 September 2008, The New York Times, 25 September 2008, Kommersant, 26 September 2008

Allegations of crimes

  • In August 2008, Sulim Yamadayev became officially wanted for the 1998 kidnapping and murder of the local businessman Usman Batsaev, a resident of the village of Dzhalka in Gudermessky District. According to the prosecution, Yamadayev reportedly had demanded $100,000 ransom for the release of Batsaev and he later told the victims’s relatives where the grave was located in April 2000., Kommersant, 7 August 2008 The involvement of Yamadayev in kidnappings for ransom was also alleged in 2006 in Anna Politkovskaya’s last article published in her lifetime (Politkovskaya wrote that according to data of the prosecutor’s office, Yamadayev’s "band" had engaged in kidnapping before the legalization as a GRU unit)., the last published article by Anna Politkovskaya
  • In June 2005, his battalion carried out the Borozdinovskaya operation, a cleansing raid that resulted in the murder of an elderly man and the disappearance of 11 civilians who were never seen again. Later, one of the Vostok commanders was given a three year suspended sentence. Yamadayev, commander of the Vostok battalion at that time, has admitted his servicemen’s guilt, but claimed that the operation had been conducted without his knowledge., RFE/RL, 29 July 2005, The Moscow Times, 29 July 2005, Memorial, 27 October 2005
  • Yamadayev’s men were accused of severing the heads of their dead victims, and sexually abusing, torturing and executing prisoners. In 2007, a Russian photographer by the name of Dima Beliakov followed Sulim Yamadayev and his Vostok battalion on a mission in Chechnya’s Vedensky District; his pictures revealed harsh behavior of Vostok servicemen during raids. In May 2008, a Vostok unit serviceman revealed the location of a secret burial ground at the decommissioned biochemical fertilizer plant near Gudermes, from which seven completely decomposed corpses were recovered. The next day, the man revealed the burial site of Vostok’s platoon leader Vakharsolt Zakayev, shot in 2003 on suspicion of having murdered Dzhabrail Yamadayev., Prague Watchdog, 12 May 2008
  • There were also reports that Yamadayev was involved in extortion of money from the meat processing factory Samson in Saint Petersburg, raided by a Chechen militia (allegedly Vostok troops) in 2006., RFE/RL, 25 April 2008
  • Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov accused Sulim Yamadayev of complicity in the assassination of his father Akhmad Kadyrov and attempts to kill Ramazan by poisoning a lake near Ramazan’s residence.

According to the Russian human rights organization Memorial in August 2008, "Now we know from evidences of eyewitnesses that during the war in Georgia the fighters of the Vostok battalion were humanely treating the prisoners of war. As far as I understand, the Chechen battalion didn’t take part in pogroms [of Georgians in Gori District, and everything incriminated to Yamadayev refers to the past."