10:56, 1 August 2015

"Yabloko" activists urge to deliver Kuashev's murder case to federal level

Activists of the "Youth Yabloko", who held solo pickets on July 31 in Moscow, believe that the inquiry into the murder of the journalist and rights defender Timur Kuashev has no prospects in Kabardino-Balkaria; it should be transferred to the federal level.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that Kuashev's body was found in a suburb of Nalchik on August 1, 2014. According to investigators, there was a trace of injection on his body.

In December 2014, investigators reported that they had interrogated over 80 people and gathered nine volumes of case files on the death of Kuashev. In January 2015, the website "change.org" posted a petition, stating that the investigators' questions to witnesses were formal. On July 31, the signatures to the petition were handed over to the Investigating Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF) and the Russian General Prosecutor's Office (GPO).

The death of Kuashev is directly linked to his journalistic and political activities, said Maria Efimova, one of Moscow picketers. According to her story, there is no hope that the murder will be duly investigated in Kabardino-Balkaria, because until now even the results of the examination of the injection trace on Kuashev's body have not been made public.

As of 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 1, the petition was signed by 849 people. Efimova has explained such a small number of signatures by the increased pressure on civil society in Russia.

According to Stanislav Belianskiy, a member of the "Yabloko" Party, the murder could be a customized one, since Kuashev "had actively defended human rights and opposed the power agents' lawlessness."

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.

Source: CK correspondent