RUSSIA: Moscow demanded yesterday that Qatar free two Russian special agents, after police in the Gulf state accused them of organising the assassination of the former Chechen president, Mr Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev.
He was blown up in his car on February 13th as he returned home from a mosque in Doha, the capital of Qatar, from where the Kremlin said he ran the finances of separatist Chechen rebels, who are fighting their second war in a decade with Russian troops.
The arrest of the agents infuriated Moscow's officials, who had vehemently denied involvement in the killing of a man they said had links to al-Qaeda, and blamed his murder on Chechens keen to win control of cash flows to the guerrillas.
Mr Igor Ivanov, Russia's acting foreign minister, summoned Qatar's ambassador in Moscow to protest the innocence of the men who, he said, were on assignment at the Russian embassy in Doha working on "information-gathering and analytical tasks related to combating international terrorism.
"The authorities' attempt to charge them with Yandarbiyev's murder is baseless," Mr Ivanov said, adding that their arrest involved the "use of weapons and rough physical force."
He said the agents, one of whom has a diplomatic passport, were arrested on the night of February 18th-19th. A third Russian was freed without charge.
The assassination of Mr Yandarbiyev shocked Qatar, which considers itself as a haven of stability in a volatile region. It also hosts a large contingent of US troops who operate in nearby Iraq.
The Chechen, who briefly led his republic after Russia assassinated Mr Dzhokhar Dudayev in 1996, had lived in Qatar for three years under the proviso that he refrain from political activities. Russia had him added to UN and US blacklists of terror suspects last year.
Mr Ivanov said yesterday that Qatar's acceptance of Mr Yandarbiyev and the arrest of Russia's agents undermined the country's credentials as a reliable ally in the US-led war on terror.
"Such connivance with international terrorism raises legal concern at the United Nations, and also cannot but disturb Arab, and all Muslim, states because it voluntarily or involuntarily is grist to the mill of those who try to link terrorism with Islam," he said.
A Qatari Foreign Ministry official described the allegation as "absurd".
"Qatar is at the forefront of the fight against terrorism, and we never had any case of terrorism before this," he said.