Caucasian militants demand a million from businessman Boiko for information about priest's murderer

Vasily Boiko, chair of the board of directors of the Company "Your Financial Trustee", accused of swindling land plots in Moscow vicinities, asks power agencies to protect him from militants of Northern Caucasus. Mr Boiko and his lawyers sent their application to the FSB after a publication in an extremists' website that he owes one million roubles to militants' leader Doku Umarov for information about the killer of Moscow priest Daniil Sysoev.

Daniil Sysoev, an Orthodox missionary and prior of the St Thomas Temple in Moscow, was shot dead by an unknown person right in his temple on November 19, 2009. Sysoev was known for his radically negative attitude to Islam. As reported by the "Kommersant" newspaper, during the last three years he turned more than 80 Moslems into Orthodoxy and wrote several theological works, in which he addressed Moslems with tough rhetoric.

Vasily Boiko promised remuneration of 1 million roubles for any information about the gunman, and Alexander Belov (Potkin), ex-leader of the Movement against Illegal Immigration, promised to add 100,000 roubles more.

On December 25, one of the websites, supporting Ingush militants, published an appeal of extremists, in which they took responsibility for the murder of the priest. According to their data, Sysoev was assassinated by the person who took an oath from Doku Umarov. After committing the murder, the culprit, as militants assert, "got to the territory of Imarat 'Kavkaz', where he became a shahid."

Now, extremists demand 1.1 million roubles from Boiko and Belov, saying that they have fulfilled the conditions for receiving the remuneration; however, they did not specify the time and way of money transfer.

"I explained from the very beginning that I'm ready to pay the reward only for truthful information about the murderer of the priest," Alexander Belov said in his interview to the "Free Press". "Militants haven't even named the criminal, providing no proofs that the person in question was at all involved in the incident. What should I pay for?"