On January 30, 2020, Chechen blogger Imran Aliyev was found dead in a hotel room in the city of Lille, France. According to local French news agencies, the 44-year-old who was known online as Mansur Stary (Old Mansur) was found dead with multiple stab wounds – the latest critic of Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov to be killed in Europe.
While it remains unclear whether Aliyev was targeted by Kadyrov’s regime, he remains the latest in a long list of Chechen critics to die a violent death abroad over the past decade. The incident draws attention to several other prominent cases involving Chechens being murdered.