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A 43-year-old man with gunshot wounds was found near the country’s capital Vienna on Saturday, according to a police report.
Police detained a 47-year-old suspect in Linz, 200 km from Vienna, adding that “the motives for the crime are still unknown.”
The victim testified in a murder case in Ukraine in 2017, when a man planning to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin was wounded near Kiev and his wife was shot, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry told AFP.
Austrian police said the dead Chechen was an asylum seeker, but did not comment further.
A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office identified the dead man as a critic of the Chechen government’s Martin B. and added that prosecutors had brought the suspect to court for his arrest.
The suspect lives in Austria but is from Chechnya.
The incident came at a time of growing concern in Austria about the safety of Chechen dissidents in exile.
In February, the exiled Chechen blogger, who criticized Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, defended himself against an attacker armed with a hammer.
A month earlier, Chechen opposition leader Imran Aliyev was found dead in a hotel room in the northern French city of Lille. 135 stab wounds were counted in his body.
Chechnya is a Muslim republic of Russia located in the North Caucasus. The two wars of the 1990s sparked a wave of emigration, and many Chechens went to Western Europe.
In recent years, more and more Chechens have been deported for disagreements with Kremlin supporter Kadyrov, who is accused by human rights activists of violating rights.
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