Wife of Chechen accused of trying to murder Putin killed
Husband injured as couple’s car sprayed with bullets
A prominent couple who were fierce critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin and who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in June, were attacked again Monday. This time an assailant killed the wife and wounded the husband.
The couple, Amina Okuyeva and Adam Osmayev, gained prominence in Ukraine as committed foes of both Putin and of the leader of the Russian region of Chechnya, Ramzan A. Kadyrov.
Russian prosecutors have long demanded Ukraine extradite Osmayev, an ethnic Chechen who faces charges related to a 2012 plot to assassinate Putin with powerful explosives. They claimed Osmayev and other plotters were linked to a Chechen rebel warlord.
The attack was the latest in a string of assassinations and attempted assassinations in Ukraine, which officials in Kyiv have mostly blamed on Russian special services. The murder of Okuyeva was the second attack in less than a week.
Still, her death was sure to be seen as especially tragic in Ukraine, because she had emerged as a heroine after the previous assassination attempt.
The couple had become minor celebrities in Ukraine for being ethnic Chechen volunteers in the war in eastern Ukraine against Russianaligned separatists. Kadyrov has publicly threatened ethnic Chechens fighting against Russia in Ukraine.
In June, a man posing as a reporter for the French newspaper Le Monde had approached Okuyeva and Osmayev, saying he wanted to write a profile of them, Okuyeva had said.
He tried to shoot them but was f oiled when Okuyeva, who was armed with a pistol, shot and wound- ed him, saving herself and her husband, the police said.
On Monday evening, an attacker sprayed the couple’s car with bullets at a railway crossing in the countryside outside Kyiv, Anton Gerashenko, a lawmaker, wrote on Facebook.
“The heart of a patriot of Ukraine has just stopped,” he wrote.
Gerashenko wrote that the gunman fired from bushes on the roadside. The police said they were searching the area Monday evening but reported no arrests.
In an interview from a hospital bed posted on YouTube, Osmayev described the attack and said his wife had been killed quickly.
“I was driving,” he said. “When the shooting started, everything was flying about around me. It was an attack on both of us. Amina was hit in the head. I tried to keep driving, as much as I could, but the engine was hit.”
THE HEART OF A PATRIOT OF UKRAINE HAS JUST STOPPED
On Wednesday, a bomb hidden in a motorcycle parked on a Kyiv street exploded, wounding a member of parliament, Ihor Mosiychuk, and killing his bodyguard and a bystander.
In March, a gunman shot and killed a former member of the Russian parliament who had defected to Ukraine. The gunman was shot and killed by the former lawmaker’s bodyguard.
In September, a car bomb in Kyiv killed another ethnic Chechen who had fought on the Ukrainian side. Another car bomb killed the journalist Pavel Sheremet in July 2016, and two other bombs killed Ukrainian security service officials this year, in June and March.