German federal prosecutors on Thursday announced that they had registered charges against a Russian man of Chechen origin for planning the murder of an exiled Chechen dissident at the behest of the Chechen security apparatus.

The man, identified only as Valid D. under German privacy laws, is accused of having been commissioned "with the logistical organization" of the murder, which included procuring a weapon with ammunition along with a silencer, and spying on the intended victim.

He was arrested on January 1, 2021, preventing the attack from being carried out.

Who was to be murdered?

The prosecutors said the intended victim and his brother were known as critics of the regime of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, which has often been accused of a range of human rights abuses by various groups. 

"The state-ordered killing was, in particular, meant to silence the brother of the intended victim," they said, in remarks carried by the AFP news agency.

According to the prosecutors, the murder was to have been carried out by another man chosen by the Chechen secret service. However, they said that this man had only pretended to take on the commission for fear of reprisals if he didn't.

Who is thought to have ordered the murder?

German news magazine Spiegel reported that the order for the killing is thought by the prosecutors to have come from a cousin of Kadyrov's who is a member of the Chechen secret service. He is also being investigated separately on suspicion of attempted incitement to murder.

Spiegel also reported that Valid D. hat occasionally worked as a confidential informant for the domestic intelligence agency in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

In December last year, a Berlin court handed another Russian national a life sentence for having murdered an ethnic Chechen man in the German capital in 2019 at the order of the Russian state security agency.

That case led to heightened diplomatic tensions between Berlin and Moscow.

Edited by: Natalie Muller