- Date
- 11/08/1996
- First
- Ramzan
- Surname
- KHADJIEV
- Sex/Age
- M, 41
- Incident
- crossfire
- Motive
- J
- Place
- car, moving
- Job
- journalist
- Medium
- TV
- Federal District Plus
- Chechnya
- Street, Town, Region
- Grozny, Chechnya
- Freelance
- no
- Local/National
- national, ORT
- Other Ties
- Cause of Death
- crossfire, shot
- Legal Qualification
- no information
- Impunity
- No Information
Ramzan Khadjiev, a correspondent with the national ORT TV channel, died on 11 August 1996 near a check point of federal troops on the way out of Grozny in Chechnya. He was killed by two shots fired from a heavy machine gun mounted on an armoured personnel carrier.
On 13 August the ORT news programme reported that Khadjiev’s body had been identified in a morgue at Tolstoy-Yurt, north of Grozny, by one of Dudayev opponent Doku Zavgayev’s bodyguards. ORT suggested that the journalist was killed by Chechen separatists. In their news programmes the NTV and Rossiya national TV channels broadcast an interview with the driver of the car in which Ramzan Khadjiev, his wife and 4-year-old son were travelling at the moment of an incident. According to his testimony it was after the military had checked the journalist’s documents, and the car started moving away from the guard post, that the APC opened fire.
Ramzan Khadjiev was born on 14 November 1955 in Kazakhstan (all Chechens were expelled to Central Asia in 1944). After he finished school in Grozny he studied in Riga (Latvia), served in the Soviet army, and entered the journalism faculty of Leningrad University, graduating in 1982. After working for Moscow publications he was invited in 1986 by the Chechen-Ingush authorities to join its TV and Radio broadcasting company, becoming its chairman in 1991.
From March 1992 he was chief manager of the TV information agency (ITA) for the North Caucasus. In April 1995 he was made head of the ORT bureau in the Chechen Republic.