Shamil Basayev has claimed responsibility for the assassination of Kadyrov. An English translation of his statement is up on kavkazcenter.com. Here is a chunk of it.
By the mercy of Allah, the Chechen people have celebrated the double holiday on May 9: victory over fascism and a small yet important victory over Russism (Russian nationalistic chauvilism).
As part of Operation Retaliation, our fighters (the Mujahideen) have successfully carried out the NAL-17 Operation and served the sentence pronounced by the Shariah Court concerning national traitors and apostates Kafir-ov (Kadyrov) and Isayev.
We apologize to President of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (CRI) Aslan Maskhadov for not being able to bring Kadyrov’s head to his feet literally, as we promised a month ago.
We hope that in the near future Almighty Allah will also allow us to successfully accomplish special operation Hersi-4.
He goes on to threaten Putin:
We wonder who will be appointed president of Russia, - Katya or Masha, - if by mercy of Allah we successfully accomplish special operation Moska – 2.
(Katya and Masha are Putin’s two daughters).
I’m not entirely convinced by this that Basayev was responsible. It’s the delay in the announcement that makes me suspicious. It strikes me that if he had been behind the assassination he would have wanted to shout it out to the world as quickly as possible. Communications in Chechnya aren’t bad enough to account for a delay of more than a week in making the announcement, which means there had to be another reason. My suspicion is that he waited to make sure no-one else claimed responsibility beforehand - if two groups had simultaneously claimed the credit, one of them would have ended up looking pretty stupid. Basayev doesn’t like to look stupid.
Interesting also to note his formal deference to Maskhadov in the statement. Not sure what to make of it yet (does Maskhadov still have some real power? does he still remain a useful figurehead?), but interesting nonetheless.
