Date

15/12/2011  

First

Hadjimurad  

Surname

KAMALOV  

Sex/Age

M  

Incident

homicide  

Motive

J  

Place

near office  

Job

director  

Medium

print  

Federal District Plus

North Caucasus  

Street, Town, Region

Makhachkala, Dagestan  

Freelance

no  

Local/National

local, "Chernovik" weekly  

Other Ties

 

Cause of Death

shooting  

Legal Qualification

Articles 105 ("Murder") and 222 ("Unlawful possession of arms") of the RF Criminal Code  

Impunity

Investigation  

SOME DETAILS FROM THE INVESTIGATION (19 March 2013)

The suspect in the killing of both Adbulmalik Akhmedilov in August 2009 and Hadjimurad Kamalov in December 2011 has been named as 30-year-old Makhachkala resident Murad Shuaibov. He was first detained for illegal possession of firearms and then later accused of murdering Akhmedilov. His lawyers say he was arrested by the police on 20 December 2012 and in court, when his detention in custody was being considered, he claimed to have been tortured. Kamalov’s brother Magdi cannot yet say whether Shuaibov was involved in Hadjimurad Kamalov’s murder: “No one has offered me clear evidence of his guilt or innocence.”

*

CHERNOVIK DIRECTOR HADJIMURAD KAMALOV MURDERED IN MAKHACHKALA (December 2011)

By Magomed Magomedov, GDF correspondent in North Caucasian Federal District

Prominent journalist and human rights activist Khadzhimurad Kamalov, the founder of the independent newspaper Chernovik, was gunned down in Makhachkala on 15 December as Russia was marking Murdered Journalists’ Remembrance Day.

According to the eyewitnesses, Chernovik’s chief editor Biyakai Magomedov and publishing editor Karimullah Magomedov, as Kamalov was getting into a taxi near his office, a light-coloured Lada Priora with the number 640 on its license plate pulled over; an unknown man got out of it to fire 14 (sic!) shots at the journalist, with 6 bullets hitting the target. Gravely wounded, Kamalov nevertheless attempted to detain the attacker, but the latter broke loose, ran toward the waiting car and drove away. Colleagues rushed Kamalov to the nearest hospital but he died en route.

His next-day funeral brought together, by different estimates, 2,000-3,500 people; his body was carried by hand over the heads of the crowd for nearly 10 km from the mosque in Kotrov Street to the International Cemetery. Mourning rally speakers included prominent Dagestani public figures; Geidar Dzhemal, head of Russia’s Islamic Committee; and Maxim Shevchenko of Moscow’s Modern World Religion and Politics Strategic Research Centre.

Dagestani President Magomedsalam Magomedov expressed condolences to the journalist’s family, friends and colleagues and said he will personally oversee the investigation of his killing. “Kamalov did a lot to make the press freer and help people exercise their constitutional right to freedom of expression,” he said. “He held an active life stand and vigorously fought against evil practices. He always called for peace, unity and public dialogue. His death is an irreparable loss not only for the journalistic community but also for the whole of our republic, since Kamalov was a prominent public activist with whom we closely co-operated and whose opinion mattered much to us. He was a member of the Presidential Economic Council who put forth many interesting initiatives that we planned to implement.”

The president added that the killing must have been masterminded by “those opposed to peace, stability and development” and who “would like to destabilise the situation and sow chaos in the republic”.

Magomedsalam Magomedov said the investigators already have gathered some evidence “giving reasons to hope that the crime will be solved soon”.

Kamalov’s relatives and friends said they have set up an organising committee to coordinate further action. In view of not a single high-resonance killing of journalists ever solved in Dagestan so far, they plan to establish a Khadzhimurad Kamalov Memory Fund and to hire professional detectives to investigate his murder.

P.S. Chernovik journalists are busy working on a special newspaper issue entirely dedicated to their colleague’s memory.


THE KILLING OF JOURNALISTS IN DAGESTAN CONTINUES

By Vakha Chapanov, GDF correspondent in North Caucasian Federal District

In 2005-2006, Khadzhimurad Kamalov was chief editor of Chernovik, a weekly newspaper known for its sharp criticism of the Dagestani authorities. He consistently defended people’s rights and liberties on the pages of his newspaper and used all legally allowed means to make law enforcement effectively investigate crimes committed in the republic. This more than once led to his clashes with corrupt government and law-enforcement officials. Also, Kamalov actively defended believers’ rights.

From the very outset, Chernovik has been listed as an opposition newspaper. Officials repeatedly lodged legal claims against it in a bid to get it shut down, but the journalists won all the cases in court. Kamalov’s articles assessing the social and political situation in Dagestan were reprinted by leading Russian and foreign newspapers.

Dagestan’s Investigative Committee has started criminal proceedings under Articles 105.1 (“Homicide”) and 222.1 (“Illegal turnover of arms”), according to a committee spokesman. One of the major versions currently being checked links the journalist’s murder with his professional activities.

This is not the first journalist killing in Dagestan: earlier this year alone, Yakhya Magomedov, editor of the Avar-language version of the Islamic newspaper As-Salam, and Garun Kurbanov, chief of the presidential administration’s Information Policy and Press Department, died at the hands of unidentified assassins.

MURDER OF “CHERNOVIK” FOUNDER REMAINS UNSOLVED (8 February 2013)

By Elena Milashina/CPJ Moscow correspondent

Gadzhimurad Kamalov, founder of the independent daily Chernovik, was murdered in Makhachkala, capital of Russia's southern republic of Dagestan, on December 15, 2011. The slaying was brazen, coming on the national Day of Remembrance for journalists killed in the course of their work. The late-evening assault took place outside Chernovik's newsroom, located on Makhachkala's Magomed Gadzhiev Street. Equipped with numerous security cameras, the street is a throughway for government motorcades, including that of the regional president. Nobody moves undetected there. But Kamalov's slaying is yet to be solved. Investigators believe two guns were used in the killing, although it is unclear how many people were involved in the deadly assault. The identities of the assailants and masterminds have yet to be revealed.

What is clear is what investigators have failed to do.

Investigators have not found a weapon. They concluded that two guns were used after examining bullet casings collected at the murder scene, and bullets that Kamalov's family members handed to forensics experts after extracting them from his body during traditional ablution at a local mosque. No autopsy was conducted; Kamalov was buried on the day of his death per Muslim tradition.

Investigators failed to retrieve recordings made by the dozens of security cameras set up in multiple locations on Magomed Gadzhiev Street. Chernovik's journalists did this on their own initiative. The images were of poor quality, however, and investigators could not identify the license plates of the suspected getaway Lada sedan, regional police sources with access to the case file told CPJ.

Efforts to track the getaway route have also failed: Police checkpoints, set up immediately after the murder throughout Makhachkala, did not spot the Lada, and a traffic-control video-streaming system, called Safe City, was not functioning. Police sources who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity said they did track phone calls made by people they consider suspects in the killing. The calls, they said, indicated that the suspects began following Kamalov in late November 2011.

This was no ordinary murder. Kamalov, the founder of an influential independent newspaper that dared to criticize powerful regional and federal security agencies, had considerable influence in Dagestan. His opinion mattered greatly in regional politics. Before he was shot, Kamalov put his newspaper's weight behind a favored candidate in the coming municipal elections in the Gunib district of Dagestan. His funeral turned into a spontaneous procession, several thousand strong; the crowds remained peaceful thanks to Kamalov's influential relatives and fellow villagers.

The federal Investigative Committee, headed by Aleksandr Bastrykin, has remained silent on the contracted slaying. Given the large public outcry, this silence has been odd.

Ali Kamalov, head of the Dagestan branch of Russian Union of Journalists (RUJ) and Gadzhimurad's uncle, told CPJ that unsolved killings of journalists in the region -- the group counts 16 in 15 years -- demands action. "We wrote an open letter to Bastrykin, urging him to take all of these cases under his personal control and assign federal-level investigators to carry out the probe," Kamalov told CPJ. The letter was signed by 105 members of parliament. Ali Kamalov said family members of slain journalists met with the representatives of the Investigative Committee and the Interior Ministry in July 2012, laying out their views of the cases.

Gadzhimurad Kamalov's relatives and Chernovik staffers attended that meeting, and told the officials that they believed regional police were involved in at least some of the killings. Ali Kamalov said relatives demanded that Moscow investigators be put in charge of the cases to avoid conflicts of interest. Instead, Kamalov said, they have been fed unsupported assertions that guerrilla fighters and radical Islamists were behind the series of deadly attacks. The relatives have been denied access to the case files.
In the case of Chernovik's founder, his relatives and colleagues told CPJ that they believe that he was murdered in retaliation for his reporting on the municipal elections in Gunib. In articles published before his death, Kamalov called on district residents to vote against the candidate supported by most regional power brokers, a person he accused of corruption.

Although the possible motive seems clear to Kamalov's family, investigators have not done much to pursue it, the slain journalist's brother, Magdi Kamalov, told CPJ. "Although we personally delivered and passed the information on potential motive and masterminds in the murder to Bastrykin and Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Russia's interior minister, there were no active measures taken or results announced. I think that the major reason for such inaction is a potential involvement in my brother's murder of high-ranking police officials in Dagestan." Magdi Kamalov said that the family had requested that agents of the FSB, Russia's security service, be commissioned to work on the case alongside the regional investigators. But the request was denied, and the family has been kept in the dark about the investigation. "They don't even inform us of their decision to extend the probe, and this is a grave violation of the victims' rights," Kamalov said.
One lead that regional investigators have actively pursued, CPJ learned, is very different -- that Nadira Isayeva, Chernovik's former chief editor and the 2010 recipient of CPJ's International Press Freedom Award, was somehow involved in Kamalov's murder.

The lead, which Kamalov's colleagues and relatives call absurd, first surfaced two weeks after the murder. On January 1, 2012, a publication called "The whole truth about Gadzhimurad Kamalov's murder" was posted online by anonymous users. The material consisted of several audio files containing bits and pieces of phone conversations between Chernovik's current editor, Biyakay Magomedov, and Kamalov and Isayeva. The files also included conversations with Isayeva's husband, Abdulkhalim Abdulkerimov, who is imprisoned on a variety of charges from forgery to robbery.

The files were edited to accuse Isayeva of hiring members of regional guerrilla groups to murder Kamalov. After the files were uploaded online, Chernovik staffers approached the investigators with their questions: Which IP address was used to publish the files? Which security service sanctioned and taped the journalists? Who published the recordings online? "Investigators failed to answer any of these questions, even though it could have helped them identify the source of this false lead," Magomedov told CPJ.

At the time of Kamalov's murder, Isayeva was long gone from Chernovik's staff. She resigned in June 2011 and left Dagestan shortly after, first for Moscow then to attend a year-long professional development program in the United States. This did not stop investigators from showing up at her parents' house in January 2012 with a summons -- one that was missing an important detail. "Neither I, nor a lawyer whom I had to hire shortly after that visit, have any idea about my status in the case," Isayeva told CPJ. "Am I a witness? Or do they see me as the primary suspect?" she asks. She and her lawyer tried to get in touch with the investigators to clarify this several times, Isayeva said. Her lawyer filed several requests asking investigators if they were interested in questioning her by phone or via Skype. After Isayeva arrived in the United States in February 2012, her lawyer suggested that Russian investigators ask their American counterparts to conduct the questioning.

"They should be interested in carrying out an objective probe into Kamalov's murder. As someone who worked with Chernovik's founder for more than six years, I could be quite a valuable witness in his murder case, and can tell them what I know," Isayeva told CPJ. She said her attempts to cooperate have been fruitless.

A postscript: Recent developments show authorities have not forgotten about Isayeva. She told CPJ that investigators in charge of Kamalov's murder recently visited her imprisoned husband. After they left, she said, Abdulkerimov was interrogated by the prison authorities in connection with the July 2011 murder of Garun Kurbanov, a regional administration official. One of the questions they asked Abdulkerimov was whether Isayeva visited him in jail before or after the official's murder. As in Kamalov's case, it appears that authorities are seeking to connect Kurbanov's killing to Isayeva. A month before Kurbanov was shot, Isayeva publicly disagreed with the official during a hearing on human rights in Dagestan. The incident was reported in the press following official's murder, and seems like the investigators consider it as another case against the journalist.

http://cpj.org/blog/2013/02/in-russia-brazen-murder-of-chernovik-founder-is-un.php