An associate of Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed leader Ramzan Kadyrov was involved in the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a Russian court has heard, in a twist to the investigation that raises as many questions as it answers.

Zaur Dadayev, a Chechen, was one of five men to appear in a Moscow courtroom on Sunday, all from Russia’s north Caucasus region.

“Dadayev’s involvement in committing this crime is confirmed by, apart from his own confession, the totality of evidence gathered as part of this criminal case,” said Judge Natalia Mushnikova.

Dadayev raised his index finger in the courtroom, a common Islamist sign, and said “I love the prophet Mohammed”, according to reporters present.

“I knew Zaur as a genuine Russian patriot,” the Chechen leader wrote on his Instagram page on Sunday evening, confirming that Dadayev had served in one of his battalions. “He was the deputy commander of the battalion, and one of the most fearless and courageous soldiers of the regiment.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tamerlan Eskerkhanov is taken into court by a policeman. Esterkhanov said he was at work at the time of Nemtsov’s murder and had witnesses who could prove it. Photograph: Dmitry Serebryakov/AFP/Getty

Kadyrov said Dadayev was “fully devoted to Russia” and suggested the murder may have been in response to anger over Nemtsov’s support for the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

“Everyone who knows Zaur says he is deeply religious person and like all Muslims was very shocked by the actions of Charlie [Hebdo] and by comments supporting the printing of the caricatures,” wrote Kadyrov. “If the court finds Dadayev guilty then by killing a person he has committed a grave crime. But I want to note that he could not do anything that was against Russia, for which he has risked his own life for many years.”

Nemtsov was gunned down on 27 February as he walked home across a bridge in the centre of Moscow, right by the Kremlin. He was shot four times and the killer escaped in a car, with many of Nemtsov’s allies noting the professional nature of the murder and raising suspicions about how such a brazen killing could take place.

Many of Nemtsov’s allies have blamed the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, personally for the murder. Some suggested that Putin’s rhetoric about a “fifth column” inside Russia had created an atmosphere of hatred that may have been seized on by radical nationalists, while others implied Putin may have ordered the killing. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, said the only way to disprove the Kremlin’s involvement was if the case was investigated properly and solved.

Putin has said he has taken “personal control” of the investigation, and his spokesman announced hours after the killing that the assassination had been “100% provocation” designed to make Russia look bad.

The “Anti-Maidan” movement, made up of politicians, nationalists and the head of a biker group close to Putin, said last week “Nemtsov’s American curators” were behind the attack. Investigators had said they were investigating various theories, including Islamic extremism and a feud between opposition leaders.

In previous high-profile murders in Russia, the person who ordered them has not been found, with officials often suggesting it was set up from outside the country to discredit Putin and the Kremlin. When the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky was still alive, officials would often claim he was behind various deaths as “false flag” operations that were made to appear as though they had been sponsored by the Kremlin; now he is dead, the claim is that the CIA or other western intelligence agencies were responsible.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said he was taking ‘personal control’ of the investigation but many of Boris Nemtsov’s allies blame Putin for the murder. Photograph: Mikhail Klimentyev/AP

However, the weekend’s events make the “foreign agents” line seem unlikely. The arrests were announced on Saturday by Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s security service, the FSB. Information about the suspects, their backgrounds and what their role was in the murder of Nemtsov remains hazy. Many were detained in Ingushetia but details about how and by whom the detentions took place were scarce. Some analysts suggested the confusion may be down to the many agencies working on the investigation, with some possibly trying to solve the crime and others striving to cover it up.

Russian news agencies said a 30-year-old man who was a suspect in the Nemtsov murder had blown himself up with a grenade when police tried to detain him in Grozny, the Chechen capital – an event liable to raise suspicions. Kadyrov said the man’s name was Beslan Shavanov, and said he was also a “brave warrior”.

In court, Dadayev and Anzor Gubashev were charged with murder, while three others, Shagid Gubashev, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov and Khamzat Bakhayev, were not formally charged but remanded in custody pending further investigation. All except Dadayev protested their innocence. Esterkhanov said he was at work at the time of the murder and had witnesses who could prove it.

The men were marched in and out of the Moscow courtroom with their heads bowed and arms handcuffed behind their backs. Once inside the defendants’ cage in the courtroom, they attempted to hide their faces from television cameras using their hoods, collars or sheets of paper.

In the murder of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, a group of Chechens were tried for the killing but the person who ordered it was never identified. Authorities hinted repeatedly that they believed Berezovsky was behind it, an explanation that was dismissed by Politkovskaya’s friends and colleagues. The journalist had written many articles exposing human rights abuses in Chechnya under Kadyrov.

Chechens are again in the spotlight over Nemtsov’s murder, though Kadyrov admitting he knew the murderer well, and going some way to justifying it, is a surprising development. State television gave extensive coverage to the court cases, and correspondents suggested that the men could have killed Nemtsov over his support for the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Later, Kadyrov’s statement seemed to bear out that this is the line investigators will pursue. Nemtsov had written a brief blog post criticising the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

Nemtsov’s 23-year-old Ukrainian girlfriend, Anna Duritskaya, was walking with the politician at the time of the killing and spent many hours giving evidence to police. However, she said she neither saw the face of the man who shot Nemtsov nor remembered much about the getaway car.

Nemtsov’s ally Ilya Yashin has said he plans to continue compiling a report on the involvement of Russian soldiers in the conflict in Ukraine, which Nemtsov had been working on before his murder.

The Chechen connection

Extraordinary footage filmed late last year shows Ramzan Kadyrov addressing a stadium in Grozny filled with thousands of armed Chechen police and special forces members dressed in camouflage standing to attention around the stadium. Kadyrov gives a long speech saying the men have pledged loyalty to Russia, and President Vladimir Putin personally, and ends by shouting: “Long live our great motherland, Russia! Long live our national leader, Vladimir Putin! Allahu Akbar!”

Kadyrov, a former militant, has won huge concessions from Moscow to rule Chechnya as he pleases, essentially turning it into his own fiefdom, where dissent is not tolerated and elements of Islamic law are in place. The unwritten deal is that Kadyrov promises nominal loyalty to Moscow of a region the Kremlin fought two bitter wars to bring under its control, while in return Moscow gives him a free hand to do as he wishes. Many Russian politicians privately express worries about the amount of power he has built up and the potential threat his armed divisions could one day pose.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Chechen commander Sulim Yamadayev, who was murdered in Dubai. Ramzan Kadyrov’s cousin Adam Delimkhanov, who is a Russian MP and seen as Kadyrov’s right-hand man, is a suspect in the case. Photograph: AP

Kadyrov has always denied allegations of human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings, but his opponents have a habit of meeting suspicious ends. In 2009, Dubai police issued an arrest warrant for Kadyrov’s cousin Adam Delimkhanov, who is a member of the Russian parliament and widely seen as Kadyrov’s right-hand man. Delimkhanov was wanted in connection with the murder of the Chechen commander Sulim Yamadayev in Dubai. Yamadayev’s brother Ruslan was shot dead in central Moscow a year earlier.

Delimkhanov continues to sit as a Russian MP, and the Sever battalion, in which the Nemtsov murder suspect Zaur Dadayev served, is controlled by his brother.

In January, several hundred thousand people gathered for a march in Grozny “in defence of the prophet Mohammad”, to condemn the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

Around the same time Kadyrov said Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who became an opponent of Putin and now resides in Switzerland after spending a decade in prison, was now his “personal enemy”. Khodorkovsky had written on Twitter that all respectable news outlets should republish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in the wake of the Paris killings.

“I am certain that even in his beloved Switzerland there will be thousands of law-abiding citizens who want to bring him to account,” wrote Kadyrov.

That Dadayev said in court that he loved the prophet Mohammad could suggest that the motive in Nemtsov’s killing was related to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Russian investigators had initially mentioned this as one possible theory. Kadyrov’s Instagram post on Sunday evening also suggests that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons is being floated as the motive.

However, of all the issues on which Nemtsov was outspoken, his stance on the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and massacre was not something he was particularly known for – he wrote just one short blog post on the issue. The demonstrative nature of his killing, right outside the Kremlin, will do little to shake the conviction of many that this was primarily a political, rather than a religious, killing.