Originally from the Chechen capital Grozny, Abdurakhmanov, 34, lives in Sweden, from where he regularly posts videos on YouTube criticizing Kadyrov and Russian President Vladimir Putin. His YouTube channel has over 250,000 followers. In 2020, a man who traveled to Sweden from Moscow, entered Abdurakhmanov’s apartment in Gävle, Sweden, and tried to kill him with a hammer. It appears that the man was let into Abdurakhmanov’s apartment by a woman with whom Abdurakhmanov had a relationship at the time, and is now believed to have been an accomplice of the would-be-assassin.

Abdurakhmanov survived the attack. The attacker, Ruslan Mamaev, is now serving a 12-year prison sentence, while the woman, Elmira Chapiaeva, is serving an 18-month sentence. Swedish authorities say they are looking for third person, who is believed to have been the would-be-assassins’ logistical link to the Chechen government, and remains at large. According to the Swedish Security Service, known as SÄPO, the operation to kill Abdurakhmanov was organized in Moscow in 2019.

In association with Abdurakhmanov’s attempted assassination, the Swedish broadcaster SVT published yesterday excerpts from an intelligence report, which offers a broad assessment of the Kremlin’s capabilities for extrajudicial killings around the world. According to the SVT, the report was produced by an unnamed “European intelligence agency”. It claims that many of the “instigators, planners, coordinators and operatives of [Russian-organized] extrajudicial killings are usually found in the special units [spetsnaz] of the National Guard of the Russian Federation”. This is primarily the case with spetsnaz units based in Chechnya, according to the report.

The conclusion of the report is that Russia “today has the same capacity as the Soviet Union once had to conduct assassination operations sanctioned by the state” around the world. The Kremlin has used this capability to carry out numerous assassinations and attempted assassinations of dissident expatriates, defectors, and other critics of the Russian government in Europe and beyond, the report concludes.