MOSCOW — The Persian Gulf nation of Qatar on Thursday announced the arrest of two Russians as suspects in the recent assassination of an exiled Chechen separatist leader.
Moscow confirmed that the two were intelligence agents but proclaimed their innocence and blasted Qatar for the action.
It is a "provocation," said Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, for the Arab country to link the Russian agents to the Feb. 13 car-bomb killing of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a leader of Chechen rebels in 1996 and 1997. Yandarbiyev, Moscow said, remained a key terrorist fundraiser until his death in the capital, Doha.
On the night of Feb. 18, Qatari authorities used "weapons and rough physical force" to detain three "employees of Russian special services," including one who carried a diplomatic passport, Ivanov said in a statement released by the Foreign Ministry.
The three were in Qatar, he said, to visit the Russian Embassy there and to carry out "tasks of an informational and analytical character connected with countering international terrorism, without any violations of local laws."
Ivanov said one of the men -- presumably the one with diplomatic immunity -- was released after negotiations.
Other exiled Chechen leaders and a former KGB officer said there was little doubt that Moscow arranged the assassination.
"They are trying to kill prominent Chechens who are living abroad and are not really hiding," said Akhmed Zakayev, special representative in Europe of ousted Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, who led the republic during a period of de facto independence in the 1990s and is now a guerrilla leader.
"I know that I should be on their hit list too," Zakayev said by telephone from Copenhagen. "But for now I feel very safe in Denmark."
Chechens exercised self-rule in their Caucasus republic after defeating Russian troops in a 1994-96 war, but Russian forces returned in 1999 and have battled guerrillas since.
Boris Labusov, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said, "We have nothing to add to the exhaustive statement of Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov."
On the night of the assassination, Labusov told the Russian news agency Itar-Tass that Moscow had discontinued foreign assassinations long ago.
