The Kremlin's version of the murder of President Vladimir Putin's long-time opponent, Boris Nemtsov, has now coalesced. The main suspect is a Chechen who apparently decided to punish Nemtsov for his defense of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in the French weekly Charlie Hebdo.
But this story has obvious weaknesses — beginning with the fact that Nemtsov wasn't an anti-Islam radical. If anything, the official narrative about the assassination makes the involvement of the Kremlin and its allies in Chechnya seem more, not less, likely.
Over the weekend, five men were detained on suspicion of organizing and carrying out Nemtsov's murder. All of them are natives of Chechnya, the formerly separatist region in the Russian North Caucasus that is now run like a personal fiefdom by Ramzan Kadyrov, the former separatist field commander who switched sides in 1999 and pledged loyalty to Putin. One of the five, Zaur Dadaev, admitted having played a key role in the assassination.
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