The killing of a Chechen blogger and asylum seeker in Austria's Vienna might have been a contract murder or motivated by a quarrel, the representative of the police department of the Lower Austria region, Johann Baumschlager, said on Thursday
VIENNA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th July, 2020) The killing of a Chechen blogger and asylum seeker in Austria's Vienna might have been a contract murder or motivated by a quarrel, the representative of the police department of the Lower Austria region, Johann Baumschlager, said on Thursday.
The police spokesman of the Lower Austria region, Walter Schwarzenecker, told Sputnik that the asylum seeker from Russia was shot dead on in Vienna in early July. The investigators have identified the victim as 43-year-old Mamikhan Umarov, who blogged under the name of Anzor of Vienna. In connection to the Vienna murder, the Austrian police have detained two suspects. Media later revealed that both suspects were Russian nationals from the Chechen Republic. Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Russia's Chechen Republic, suggested that foreign security services had a role in the killing.
"We do not exclude that, on the one hand, we are talking about a contract murder, or, on the other hand, that a quarrel might have flared up there," Baumschlager told a press conference.
According to the police, the alleged shooter refuses to speak, while the second suspect also has not yet provided any details. Both of them will be held in pretrial detention until July 20.
Baumschlager said that the victim received refugee status in Austria back in 2007, but was subsequently deprived of it and challenged the move with the authorities. Notably, the two suspects also received such status in 2003 and 2004, but it was revoked and their complaints are being processed.
"Since the beginning of 2020, the victim had been sharing videos on the internet using a fake name, in which, among other things, he criticized the [regional] head of authorities in his homeland [Kadyrov]. This led to threats he received from supporters of the head [of the republic]. The threats' intensity increased, and they were taken seriously by Vienna's Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism," Baumschlager stated.
The Austrian Interior Ministry, in turn, told Sputnik on Thursday that the killing of the Chechen blogger must be investigated quickly and thoroughly.
