Lawyers: Dubai police stumbled in Chechen slaying

Defense lawyers for two suspects in the 2009 slaying of a former Chechen warlord claimed Thursday that Dubai police have failed to present enough firm evidence to back up their charges.

The attorneys also suggested that investigators bungled the probe into the March 2009 killing of Sulim Yamadayev by not thoroughly questioning his bodyguards and others in his entourage.

The suspected assassins are believed to have fled the United Arab Emirates. But two men _ from Iran and Tajikistan _ are accused of being accomplices in the murder of Yamadayev, who was a bitter foe of Chechnya's Moscow-backed president.

Yamadayev's gangland-style slaying in a beachfront parking lot stunned Dubai authorities as the first major political assassination in the Gulf city-state, which has increasingly become a way station for exile leaders and others.

But the slaying has been overshadowed by the January killing of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh by a hit squad that Dubai police say are linked to Israel's Mossad secret service.

One of the defense lawyers, Obeid Ali, told the court that police failed to get full details from Yamadayev's bodyguards and other associates before they left the country.

Other defense lawyers also claimed that police have provided no hard evidence linking the two suspects to the killing. They also contend that the suspects were not offered official translators and any purported confessions were made "under duress."

Police investigators previously testified that they discovered a hand-drawn map showing the murder site. The two suspects were later arrested for helping plot the killing.

They have both pleaded not guilty. The next hearing was set for April 12, when a verdict is possible.

Yamadayev was a former Chechen warlord who switched sides in the conflict and allied with the Russian government in its battled with Chechen rebels. But Yamadayev later fell out of favor with the region's Kremlin-allied president, Ramzan Kadyrov, and sought refuge abroad.

Yamadayev had been living under an alias in a luxury high-rise complex along the Gulf coast.

Other suspects wanted by Dubai authorities in the slaying include Adam Delimkhanov, a Russian parliament deputy and close ally of the Chechen president. Delimkhanov has denied Dubai's allegations that he masterminded the killing.