Briefs

Former Deputy Mayor of Grozny Murdered in Moscow

Former Grozny Deputy Mayor Gilani Shepiev was murdered in Moscow in the early hours of February 5. Newsru.com quoted an anonymous Moscow law-enforcement source as saying the murder appeared to be a contract killing and related to his former position as deputy mayor of the Chechen capital. The source said that the 36-year-old Shepiev was shot to death around 1 a.m., local time, near the entranceway to the apartment building where he had been living in Moscow in recent years. Interfax reported that according to eyewitnesses, an unidentified gunman shot Shepiev three times in the head and then fled. According to Newsru.com, Shepiev was seriously wounded in an attack back in 2006, when unidentified gunmen opened fire on his car in the center of Grozny. After that incident, Shepiev stepped down as Grozny’s deputy mayor and moved to Moscow.

Another Young Woman Murdered in Chechnya

Interfax reported on February 4 that the body of a 21-year-old woman was found with six gunshot wounds in a forested area four kilometers from the village of Grebenskaya in Chechnya’s Shelkovsky district. A spokesman for the Chechen branch of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office said the dead woman was being identified and that she lived in the village of Komsomolskoye in Chechnya’s Naursk district. The spokesman noted that the bodies of seven young women with gunshot wounds were discovered in Grozny and other parts of Chechnya in November 2008 (North Caucasus Weekly, December 4, 2008) but that their was no confirmation that any of the victims were killed by their relatives for allegedly “indecent conduct” (i.e., that they were victims of honor killings).