The Guardian
Russia today demanded the extradition of the London-based Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev after Polish police dramatically arrested him at a conference in Warsaw.
Zakayev – who was granted political asylum by Britain in 2003 – was detained early this morning on his way to see the Polish prosecutor. He had flown into the Polish capital from London to attend a Chechen People's Congress.
Zakayev is the most high-profile surviving Chechen separatist leader from the 1990s, when he served as deputy prime minister in the quasi-independent government of Aslan Maskhadov. The British court decision to give him asylum on the basis he might be tortured back in Russia infuriated the Kremlin, and contributed to the slump in UK-Russian relations.
Russia's prosecutor general today confirmed he was urgently sending evidence to his Polish counterpart of Zakayev's alleged involvement in terrorist activities. Russia had issued a warrant via Interpol for his arrest, and has been seeking his return to Russia for nearly a decade.
Last year Chechnya's Kremlin-installed president, Ramzan Kadyrov, encouraged Zakayev to return home, and apparently offered him a job as arts minister.
Zakayev, a former actor and the head of Chechnya's government-in-exile, held a series of meetings in Europe to discuss political reconciliation with Kadyrov's trusted henchman Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov. But the plan fell through when Russia refused to drop outstanding terrorist charges against him. At the same time Chechnya's current Islamist rebel leadership denounced Zakayev as a traitor and announced their intention to kill him.
The Polish prosecutor now has to decide whether there are grounds to send Zakayev back to what would almost certainly be a Russian jail.
The insurgency in Chechnya has evolved from when Zakayev and other now-assassinated leaders sought to create their own largely secular independent and constitutional state. The current generation of Chechen fighters are no longer battling for independence but want to establish a Taliban-style Islamist emirate across Russia's northern Caucasus.
The insurgency has spilled over from Chechnya into the volatile neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, where bomb attacks and shoot-outs between rebels and government security forces take place on a daily basis. Last week a suicide bomber killed 17 people in a crowded market in Valdikavkaz, the predominantly Christian capital of North Ossetia.
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