More evidence of the almost cosmic brilliance of the International Olympic Committee in picking Sochi as home of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games:
''How stupid and crude to kill people in the (city) center; why would I need to do this?'' asked Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov in this morning's New York Times. There has been a bit of a dust up between President Kadyrov and the Austrian government these last few days, because the Austrians have indirectly accused Mr. Kadyrov of doing just that.
Does President Kadyrov imply that it would be less stupid and crude to kill people, say, in the back seat of a car after an abduction? Austria's anti-terrorism authorities suspect Kadyrov of planning to kidnap the dead man, Umar Israilov (one of the Chechen president’s bodyguards before falling out with him) in Vienna.
"It seems he was shot after the kidnapping failed," Gerhard Jarosch, a Viennese official, said.
If abduction and murder are less stupid and crude than killing people in the city center, then presumably President Kadyrov has cover in "a string of contract-style slayings — in Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Moscow, Europe and the Middle East — that have silenced the Chechen president’s critics or rivals."
Sochi, the Olympic city, is less than 300 miles from Grozny, Mr. Kadyrov's seat of power and epicenter of the Chechen conflict that, by the most conservative estimates, killed 30,000 civilians. It's also about twenty miles up the Black Sea coast from the Republic of Georgia, with whom Russia fought the summer war of 2008, and less than 300 miles from Beslan, home to the 2004 school hostage crisis that killed at least 334.
Get your tickets early.
(See photos in the Russia Gallery and the Georgia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
Comments