- Date
- 02/09/2008
- First
- Telman
- Surname
- ALISHAYEV
- Sex/Age
- M
- Incident
- homicide
- Motive
- J
- Place
- car
- Job
- journalist
- Medium
- TV
- Federal District Plus
- North Caucasus
- Street, Town, Region
- Makhachkala, Dagestan
- Freelance
- no
- Local/National
- local, TV Chirkei
- Other Ties
- Cause of Death
- murder, shot
- Legal Qualification
- 105 (murder)
- Impunity
- investigation
[Updated 16 October 2010]
The Investigative Committee, which now answers directly to the President (until recently it answered to the Prosecutor General), has given assurances to a visiting delegation from the CPJ that it will give serious consideration to 19 deaths that the CPJ believes to have been murders linked to the professional activities of the deceased journalist. One name on this list is that of Abdullah (Telman) Alishayev.
(See agency and Russian media reports on CPJ press conference)
MAIN ENTRY
Telman (Abdullah) Alishayev, a journalist with the TV-Chirkei channel, was shot in Makhachkala on 2 September 2008. Two men approached the car in which he was sitting in the suburb of Separatorny and opened fire. Alishayev was taken to Dagestan’s central hospital with a wound to the head and the shoulder and despite an operation died the next morning.
Alishayev presented the “Peace to your home” programme on the TV-Chirkei Muslim TV channel, and was among the authors of a documentary film “Everyday Wahhabism”. After the film was shown he received threats. The Dagestan department for internal affairs considers that Alishayev’s active opposition to Wahhabism as a journalist was the reason for his death.
A criminal case was instigated under two articles of the criminal code, “Murder“ (105) and the “illegal bearing of a firearm" (222). There are suspects who have been identified by witnesses to the killing. Speaking on radio station Echo Moskvy the chairman of the Russian Union of Journalists Vsevolod Bogdanov said that such tragedies, first and foremost, “showed the lack of stability in the region and that the authorities became drawn in criminal feuds”.
UPDATE BY PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE
In April 2009, in response to an enquiry from Alexei Simonov of the Glasnost Defence Foundation, the Prosecutor General’s Office said that the killer had been identified as Vadim Butdayev (b. 1979), a criminal wanted for a number of serious offences, who was killed on 17 November 2008 during a special operation in Makhachkala. The investigation was ongoing.