Austrian police have arrested a Russian from Chechnya over the fatal shooting of a Chechen dissident.
A 43-year-old man was found dead with gunshot wounds in Gerasdorf, near Vienna, on Saturday. Police arrested a 47-year-old in Linz, 125 miles (200km) from the capital, and said: “The motives for the crime are unclear.”
A prosecution spokesman identified the dead man as Martin B, a critic of the Chechen government. They said prosecutors were seeking a court order to keep the suspect in detention.
Police said the victim was an asylum seeker. The suspect lives in Austria and is originally from the Chechnya region.
The Ukrainian interior ministry told AFP that the dead man had given evidence in a 2017 murder case in Ukraine. The case concerned the killing of the wife of a man who had plotted to murder Vladimir Putin.
The shooting in Vienna comes amid growing concern over the security of Chechen dissidents living in exile. In February an exiled Chechen blogger who was critical of the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, fended off an attacker armed with a hammer.
A month earlier, the Chechen opposition leader Imran Aliev was found dead in a hotel room in the northern French city of Lille after being stabbed 135 times.
Chechnya is a predominantly Muslim Russian republic in the North Caucasus. Two wars in the 1990s triggered a wave of emigration, with many Chechens heading for western Europe.
More Chechens have fled into exile in recent years because of disagreements with the pro-Kremlin Kadyrov, whom rights activists accuse of repeated rights violations.
