Kadyrov: ‘I will kill as long as I live’

More anecdotal evidence has emerged of the swaggering, bullying style of the Chechnyan President Ramzan Kadyrov, who human rights campaigners are convinced ordered the brutal killing this week of Natalia Estimerova. As reported by The First Post yesterday, the 50-year-old investigator of human rights abuses in Chechnya was discovered shot dead after being abducted from her home in the capital Grozny early on Wednesday.

Kadyrov himself vowed yesterday to personally oversee the investigation into Estimerova's murder. But no one in the world of human rights is fooled by a man who once told Russian GQ: "I've already killed who I should have killed. And I will kill all of those standing behind them, as long as I myself am not killed or jailed. I will be killing as long as I live."

That was in 2005, a year after Kadyrov came to national prominence following the assassination of his father, President Akhmad Kadyrov, in May 2004. Kadyrov Jnr, still only 27 and with a bizarre reputation as a Chechen rebel who had changed sides, responded to his father's death by traveling to meet Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. Dressed in a sky-blue tracksuit, he accepted a public handshake and condolences from the Russian president - and has never been out of his pocket since.

As Shaun Walker reports from Moscow today for the Independent, though Kadyrov had to wait another three years to become president, that meeting with Putin was, to all intents and purposes, his coronation. "He had been given Mr Putin's personal backing, and used it to outmanoeuvre, threaten and possibly even physically eliminate his enemies, whether in Chechnya or abroad."

Today, still only 32, Kadyrov rules Chechnya in a manner to make Josef Stalin proud. His ginger-bearded face stares out from Orwellian Big Brother-style billboards, while he lives in a fortified compound in his home village of Tsenteroi - with a pet lion and a rare tiger - where, it is claimed, he tortures enemies of the state.

He is a keen boxer who counts the convicted rapist Mike Tyson as a friend. His vast wealth is said to come from kickbacks from oil sales.

The menace he exudes was caught in a rare meeting with a Western journalist two years ago. Andrew Osborn wrote: "A squat, powerfully built man, he swaggers rather than walks, with his powerful boxer's shoulders almost bursting out of his pinstriped suit. His press attache... keeps an eye on his charge as if he were guarding a stick of dynamite primed to explode if faced with one hostile question."

The journalist had asked for the audience in the wake of the murder in October 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who made her name investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya and was a close friend of Estmerova's.

Kadyrov "winced slightly" at Osborn's questions, but then acted as if the notion that he would have Politkovskaya killed was far-fetched. "Why would I have killed her?" he asked. "She used to write bad things about my father, and if I had wanted to, I could have done something bad to her at that time. Why now?"

Yet many observers were - and still are - convinced that Kadyrov, in tandem with the Kremlin, arranged Politkovskaya's removal. Politkovskaya, like Estimerova, was one of Kadyrov's fiercest critics, calling for him to be removed from power and put on trial for his alleged crimes.

"He is an extremely cruel man," Politkovskaya told Ekho Moskvy radio in an interview broadcast shortly before her death. "I have met several people who told me that Ramzan Kadyrov personally tortured them in his home in the village of Tsentoroi.

"They [the witnesses] said that Kadyrov and the other man with him used very elaborate torture. For example, they peel narrow strips of skin off a person's back. This is the sort of torture you would call medieval brutality."

Another voice from beyond the grave is heard today with the appearance in the Independent of a report written by Natalia Estimerova in August 2008, and unpublished until now.

Estimerova wrote: "Political observers claim Kadyrov is ruling over Chechnya independently of Russia. Is it really so? Tens of thousands of Chechens pining away in Russian prisons would not agree. Neither would the hundreds of thousands of war victims, or the relatives of the killed and missing. And the outflow of Chechen refugees to European countries is not subsiding. On the contrary: more and more people are trying to leave. A dictatorship is being cemented in a small European territory." ·