Boris Nemtsov was murdered on 27 February.
After arrests in the murder case of Boris Nemtsov, prosecutors must now convince the Russian public that two Muslin men from the North Caucasus, Anzor Gubashev and Zaur Dadayev, found it necessary to gun down an opposition leader to president Vladimir Putin.
Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin suggested that the murder may have been a provocation to destabilize the government of Vladimir Putin. Others close to the Kremlin speculate that Nemtsov angered Islamist s by his condemnation of the recent Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris.
Not that we did not see it coming. It seems that the “usual suspects” of such shadowy crimes in Russia, invariably end up with arrests from this volatile region of southern Russia.
Oddly, although previous government sources indicated that some of the surveillance cameras had been turned off for “repairs” the night of the murder, while other nearby cameras had been “redirected” towards the Kremlin area, now investigators say that “clear images” from those previously non-working cameras helped positively identify the two men as the shooters. Cell phone billing records were also identified as part of the investigation.
Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s federal security service, told news sources that Vladimir Putin had been informed of the arrests. Nemtsov was deputy prime minister during the 1990s government of Boris Yeltsin. He was shot four times while walking over a bridge near the Kremlin the night of 27 February.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, just released from jail on Friday, accuses government figures of ordering a hit on Nemtsov. The two men were friends, and Nemtsov’s business partner was Navalny’s campaign finance manager in the most recent Moscow mayoral election.