Sources say Nemtsov was killed for offending Muslims

The news agency Rosbalt says its sources in the police claim the motive for killing Boris Nemtsov was revenge for his negative comments about Muslims, Islam, and the Prophet Muhammad. The main murder suspect, Zaur Dadayev, is reportedly a deeply religious man who decided to retaliate against Nemtsov.

“Dadayev has basically confessed to organizing this crime, so there’s no reason to expect any high-profile revelations or arrests in the future,” Rosbalt’s source reports.

On January 9, Nemtsov wrote a blog post about the Charlie Hebdo killings, titled Islamic Inquisition, where he said that Islam “finds itself in the Middle Ages,” and called on Muslims to “fight for the secular state, and separate the mosque from political authority.” 

Surrounded by his close friends (particularly Beslan Shavanov, a fellow Interior Ministry veteran), Zaur Dadayev decided that Boris Nemtsov was offending Muslims and—based on a false sense of patriotism and a need to defend his religion—Dadayev resolved to punish Nemtsov. So he recruited his two cousins, Zaur Gubashev and Shadid Gubashev, who have lived near Moscow for over a decade and know the city well.

Boris Nemtsov was shot and killed in Moscow on February 27. On March 7, the head of the Federal Security Service, Alexander Bortnikov, announced the apprehension of two murder suspects: Zaur Dadayev and Anzor Gubashev. Dadayev served in the Chechen Sever (“North”) battalion, a division of Russia’s Interior Ministry. On March 8, Dadayev and Gubashev were charged formally with murder, along with another three suspects: Shagid Gubashev, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov, and Khamzat Bakhaev. Of all five men now in custody, Dadayev was the only suspect not to plead not guilty during arraignment.

On March 9, Rosbalt reported that another two suspects in Nemtsov’s murder have allegedly been apprehended. Police aren’t yet releasing their names, but one of the new suspects is apparently the cousin of a high-ranking security official in Chechnya.