Key Suspect in Paul Klebnikov Murder Case Detained In Belarus :: Charter'97 :: News

One of the main suspects in the murder case of Paul Klebnikov, editor-in-chief of Forbes’ Russian edition, has been detained in Minsk. A man by the name of Kazbek, carrying ID papers with three different names, is believed to have masterminded the attack on the prominent journalist in July.

Investigators are now trying to establish the true identity of the detainee. Belarusian security services have also detained a man by the name Valid Agayev, a master of sport in free-style wrestling, who was recently placed on the wanted list by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia, the Vremya Novostei newspaper reported.

Paul Klebnikov was murdered in the evening of July 9, 2004, as he was leaving his office building in Moscow. He died while in an ambulance en route to the hospital. On the following day the police found a VAZ-2115 car that had reportedly been driven by the criminals who shot the journalist.

The first to fall under suspicion were a group of ethnic Chechens, residing in Moscow. According to some reports, the police traced them by checking all the calls made on mobile phones in the area on July 9. Other reports said the police had received a tip-off.

The suspects were placed under surveillance, whereupon investigators learned that banker Akhmed-Pashi Aliyev had been held hostage in the apartment of Aslan Sagayev, 24, in Moscow. On Sept. 27 the entrepreneur was freed, while Sagayev and his accomplice Kazbek Elmurzayev were arrested.

The banker told the investigators that he had been involved in preparing a joint commercial project with several FSB officers including Captain Roman Slivkin and had received $100,000 from them. Slivkin is currently under arrest. Aliyev failed to repay the debt on time, was kidnapped and then asked his Chechen acquaintances for assistance. Valid Agayev paid the ransom for the banker and then he and Sagayev in turn demanded compensation from him.

Police also suspect Valid Agayev of being involved in other crimes. In 2000 he was detained in Moscow shortly after a terrorist attack in Pushkin Square. Although he had been carrying a bomb, he was soon released.

Agayev also came to the attention of the security services in the wake of Paul Klebnikov’s murder. It transpired that one of Agayev’s closest associates, a man by the name of Kazbek, called Agayev several times shortly before and soon after the attack on the journalist.

A person who knows Kazbek told Vremya Novostei, Kazbek personally knew both Aslan Sagayev and Musa Vakhayev. The latter was arrested on suspicion of murdering Klebnikov on Nov. 19. Last week he was charged with murder under Article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code. Investigators believe he was behind the wheel of the car used by the assassins.

Paul Klebnikov was born in New York in 1963 to a family of Russian immigrants. He graduated from California University, Berkley and the London School of Economics, completing his doctorate in 1991. Klebnikov started working for Forbes Magazine in 1989. Promoted to senior editor, Klebnikov was an expert on Russian and East European politics and economics. His special field of interest was conducting investigations into the origins of wealth of the so-called ’oligarchs’ and their possible ties to the Russian mafia.

In 1996 he wrote an article in Forbes calling exiled Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky the “Godfather of the Kremlin” and suggesting that the tycoon — who made his fortune during Russia’s controversial privatisation programme in the 1990s — might have been implicated in the murder of a well-known TV anchorman and had links with Chechen organized crime groups.

Berezovsky sued the magazine for defamation, after which Forbes admitted in an open court that the allegations were unfounded and Berezovsky withdrew his suit. During the proceedings, however, Klebnikov published an equally controversial book, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia in which he asserted that Berezovsky had also channelled hundreds of millions of dollars out of Russia.

Klebnikov’s second book, Conversation With a Barbarian, written in Russian and published in 2003, was based on a series of interviews with Chechen separatist leader Khozh Akhmed Nukhayev and dealt, among other subjects, with organized crime in Russia’s ongoing war in Chechnya.

Paul Klebnikov became the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Forbes in April 2004. In May, the magazine published a list of the 100 wealthiest people in Russia, many of whom said they were unhappy about the publication.

While in charge of the new Russian Forbes, Klebnikov was also undertaking certain independent investigations that he did not speak of, the Russian online news service Gazeta.Ru reported, citing the source from Forbes.