Chechen Leader: Pop Star Victim of Anti-Gay 'Honor Killing'

For months, Chechen officials have denied nay involvement in the disappearance of 25-year-old pop singer Zelimkhan Bakaev, despite reports that he was abducted by state police and killed in detention. Now they're offering a theory of their own: Chechen Republic president Ramzan Kadyrov said this week that Bakaev was likely murdered by his own brothers for being gay.

Reports about an anti-gay crackdown in Chechnya - a region of Russia, itself a bastion of anti-gay hate - include stories of arrests, abductions by police, torture, murder and concentration camps where gays are detained. Chechen authorities have denied these stories, but an international underground railroad has ferried more than twenty gay men out of the region. Those refugees have offered chilling details about anti-gay abuses in Chechnya.

The saga began last August, when Bakaev disappeared in Chechnya's capital city, Grozny. Reports surfaced that the 25-year-old singer had been grabbed by security forces and stuffed into a car. Those reports were followed by unsubstantiated claims that Bakaev had been interrogated and tortured, and that he had died while in detention.

Radio Free Europe recounted how authorities contradicted those reports and declared they had no knowledge of the singer's whereabouts. Officials then pointed to a pair of YouTube videos, posted in September, that purported to show Bakaev - though, as Gay Times noted, people who knew him personally said the man in the video appeared too "sloppy" and too thin to be the missing singer. The man in the videos claimed he was staying in Germany, but visible clues led some to believe that the recordings had been made in Russia.

In October the LGBT Network, a Russian rights group, claimed to have confirmed earlier reports of Bakaev being abducted and killed. The group's leader, Igor Kochetkov, told the press that Bakaev "was detained by Chechen authorities due to suspicion of homosexuality."

Now Crime Russia reports on a new twist, saying that Kadyrov appeared on a Chechen state news program and seemingly complained about Bakaev's family suggesting that the singer had been detained by security forces.

"His relatives, who do not keep up, who are ashamed to admit that; now they say that Kadyrov has taken him," the Chechnyan leader said, referring to himself in the third person. "Where is your evidence? Have you heard me say on television that I need to catch him? Or how did the police officers arrest him?"

Then Kadyrov turned the matter back on to the singer's family, saying they "could not stop him, and then they called home, and the brothers apparently put in for his homosexuality." That last comment was interpreted by various news sources to mean that Bakaev's male relatives carried out a so-called "honor killing" against him, which is a slaying intended to restore honor to a family after the victim's purported misdeeds. If that was indeed what happened, the Chechen government is arguably still culpable, if reports of Chechen police ordering civilians to kill gay family members are to be believed.

Kadyrov then appeared to taunt Bakaev's family, saying, "There are no men in the family to admit that they did it? They know perfectly well who their relative is."

One male relative spoke up in response. Bakaev's father, Khussein Bakaev, told the media, "None of his relatives laid a finger on him, and there was no reason to lay a finger on him," Radio Free Europe reported.

News sources took note that this is the first time a Chechyan official has come out with any sort of admission that the young pop star is dead.