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STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – A hammer-wielding Russian man who tried to beat to death a well-known blogger and critic of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov in Sweden last year was sentenced on Monday to 10 years in prison by a Swedish court.
Tumso Abdurakhmanov survived the Feb. 26 attack in the town of Gavle. The court did not give the convicted defendant’s name, in keeping with Swedish practice.
A woman who helped the assailant by letting him into Abdurachmanov’s apartment, was given an 8-year term. Both will be expelled from Sweden, Swedish news agency TT said. Foreign convicts are normally expelled after serving their sentence.
Prominent critics of Kadyrov have been the victims of a number of attacks in recent years.
In February 2020, Chechen blogger Imran Aliyev was found stabbed to death in a hotel in Lille, France. The same month, a Russian investigative journalist who had alleged that gay men in Chechnya were subject to mass arrest and torture was beaten up in the Chechen capital Grozny.
In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who covered Chechnya for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, was shot dead as she returned to her Moscow apartment.
Human rights workers have accused Kadyrov of widespread abuses, allegations he denies.
Supporters credit him with restoring relative calm to a region dogged for years by a simmering insurgency following two wars between Moscow and separatists after the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union.
(Reporting by Simon Johnson; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
