The investigation into the murder of Boris Nemtsov is coming to a close, say Russian investigators, who named Ruslan Mukhudinov, the personal driver of a top commander of one of Chechnya’s armed battalions, as the mastermind behind the attack.

The opposition leader’s associates and supporters said the announcement showed the investigation had been an attempt to cover up the potential involvement of higher-level Chechen figures, right up to the region’s pro-Moscow leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Ilya Yashin, Nemtsov’s political ally, said: “The investigators are carrying out a political order to cover up the real culprits, not only the real mastermind but even the real organisers. Mukhudinov was an ordinary driver, it’s absolutely clear he was not the initiator of this crime.”



Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigative committee, told news agencies that Mukhudinov was the “organiser and mastermind” behind the assassination.

Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer for Nemtsov’s family, told Interfax that Mukhudinov could be a “low-level organiser” of the killing but he believed the hit was ordered by high-level officials.



“Besides, even Mukhudinov has not been caught, not been questioned and nobody knows where he is, so it’s impossible to say he ordered it,” Prokhorov said.

Boris Nemtsov, pictured in 2011, was shot dead outside the Kremlin in February. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

Nemtsov was shot outside the Kremlin as he walked home late at night with a female companion in February. The killing sent shockwaves through Russia’s opposition movement, and the president, Vladimir Putin, said the killers must be apprehended.

Five Chechen men were quickly arrested on charges of involvement in the killing. One, Zaur Dadayev, admitted involvement but later said his confession was made under duress. Dadayev was the deputy commander of one of Kadyrov’s battalions. Yashin said that the men behind bars may have been involved in the murder but as low-level pawns rather than the people who had planned and ordered it.

Mukhudinov is believed to have been the personal driver of Ruslan Geremeyev, who was a senior commander of the battalion. Investigators were unable to question Geremeyev, who was apparently kept under guard in Chechnya and is now believed to have left the republic. Mukhudinov is also on the run and has not been apprehended or questioned by investigators. Markin said it was only a matter of time before Mukhudinov was arrested.



Yashin said the investigation was proceeding well until the lead investigator was taken off the case and replaced over the summer – he believes to prevent the inquiry from coming too close to the Chechen leadership.

“The trail leads to Grozny and to the offices of top officials in Grozny,” said Yashin. “Ramzan Kadyrov should at the very least be questioned. It seems implausible that the top officers of his battalions would carry out a murder without at least informing him of it. Whether or not the trail stops at Kadyrov or whether it leads further, to offices in Moscow, that is an open question and should be worked on by the investigators.”

In October, Kadyrov denied any link to the Nemtsov murder and suggested the real killers were inside Nemtsov’s close circle. Geremeyev has not spoken out about the murder, but Kadyrov has previously said “everyone knows” that Geremeyev was not involved.

There have been a number of killings of Kadyrov’s personal enemies as far afield as Moscow, Dubai and Vienna in recent years, though the Chechen leader has denied involvement in all of them. Soon after the initial arrests, Kadyrov wrote on Instagram that Dadayev was a “patriot of Russia”. Shortly after the killing, Putin presented Kadyrov with a medal, interpreted by many as a sign that the investigation should not touch the Chechen leader.

Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, was a vocal if marginal figure in contemporary Russian politics. At the time of his death he was working on a report into Russian military involvement in the Ukraine conflict. The report was later published by Yashin.

Initially, leaks from the investigation claimed Nemtsov may have been killed for remarks he made in defence of the slain cartoonists of French magazine Charlie Hebdo, although his associates said this claim was also part of a cover-up to obscure political reasons for the murder.

Earlier this month, a Moscow court ruled that the murder was not political.



“During the course of the investigation we have positively established that the killing of Nemtsov was not in any way connected with his work as a state official, politician or public activist,” one of the investigators told the court, Interfax reported. The court agreed with the assessement.

In a recent column for the Moscow Times, Nemtsov’s daughter Zhanna Nemtsova said she believed her father was killed “for his views, for daring to express his position, for his unwillingness to be indifferent or apathetic”. She criticised Russian politicians and society for their unwillingness to demand an objective investigation into the case.

At his annual press conference earlier this month, Putin said he had not discussed the killing with Kadyrov because it was inappropriate. Of Nemtsov, he said: “I knew him personally and our relations had not always been bad. I never quarrelled with him but he chose this path of political competition by making personal attacks and the like ... However, this does not mean at all that the man should have been killed.”