The relatives of three Chechen men gunned down in Istanbul last Friday have accused a Russian secret service hit squad of executing them on the Kremlin's orders.
The triple murder was carried out by a lone gunman in less than thirty seconds using a 9mm pistol fitted with a silencer. It brought the number of Chechens assassinated in the Turkish city in the last four years to at least six.
The gunman pumped eleven bullets into the three men in a busy Istanbul street before speeding off in a black getaway car.
One of the murdered men, 33-year-old Berg-Haj Musayev, was said to be close to Doku Umarov, an Islamist terrorist leader who is Russia's most wanted man. The other two were said to be his bodyguards.
It was Umarov who claimed responsibility for the January suicide bombing of Moscow's busy Domodedovo airport, an atrocity that left 37 people dead.
Musayev's widow Sehida said she was sure the Russian secret service was behind her husband's murder, a view echoed by Murat Ozer, head of a Chechen diaspora group in Istanbul.
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