One of the six men authorities believe were involved in the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was cornered by police at his hiding place in Grozny, Chechnya and blew himself up with a grenade.

Five other suspects appeared in court yesterday. Two have been charged in the Nemtsov killing while 3 others have yet to be indicted. One of those charged in the assassination, Zaur Dadayev, is said to have confessed to the crime. Dadayev has connections to the highest level of the Chechyen government, being an associate of the Kremlin-backed pupett leader Ramzan Kadyrov He appeared in courtf flashing the "one God" hand sign and proclaiming “I love the prophet Mohammed"

Kadyrov suggested the reason Dadayev killed Nemtsov was because he was a "devout Muslim" who was angered by Nemtsov's condemnation of the Charlie HEbdo massacre.

The Guardian:

“I knew Zaur as a genuine Russian patriot,” the Chechen leader wrote on his Instagram page on Sunday evening, confirming that Dadayev had served in one of his battalions. “He was the deputy commander of the battalion, and one of the most fearless and courageous soldiers of the regiment.”

Kadyrov said Dadayev was “fully devoted to Russia” and suggested the murder may have been in response to anger over Nemtsov’s support for the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

“Everyone who knows Zaur says he is deeply religious person and like all Muslims was very shocked by the actions of Charlie [Hebdo] and by comments supporting the printing of the caricatures,” wrote Kadyrov. “If the court finds Dadayev guilty then by killing a person he has committed a grave crime. But I want to note that he could not do anything that was against Russia, for which he has risked his own life for many years.”

Kadayov and Dadayev are not Chechen separatists, but Moscow enforcers hired to keep a lid on violence in the restive region. The suspect who blew himself up, Beslan Shavanov, has no criminal record. There is no record of what religion the other suspects belonged to, but Islam is the dominant religion in the region.

Why Muslims from Chechnya?

An expert and journalist covering the North Caucasus, Orkhan Dzhemal, sees the allegation as a predictable development, and the kind the FSB may consider easy for the Russians public to accept, with “a Chechen trail” and Nemtsov being “a sacred victim” ordered by the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion fighting in Ukraine against pro-Russian rebels—even thought Nemtsov was one of the most outspoken Russian critics of those rebels and of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for them.

By this somewhat convoluted reasoning, pro-Ukrainian and pro-Western “Chechens killed Nemtsov on purpose to harm Putin,” Dzhemal said in an interview for Russian independent network Dozhd TV. Dzhemal also said that he expected to hear that Nemtsov’s murderers came from anti-Maidan revolution circles and that according to his knowledge and understanding that the order to kill Nemtsov did not come from the government of Ukraine.

The core question remains unanswered: Who ordered the murder of Boris Nemtsov?

The politician’s daughter Zhanna Nemtsova, a television journalist at RBC channel (and no relation to the author of this article), doubts that the real murderers of her father are going to be punished. In an interview with Bild am Sonntag, the largest-selling Sunday paper in Germany, Nemtsova said that she was convinced her father was killed “because he was against of the Kremlin.”

Nemtsova insisted that the “contract murder” of her father was committed with “full support of the authorities,” and that her father’s killers “knew for sure that they would never be punished.”

Just what did Dadayev confess to? Some Russian media outlets are going with the story that "forensic evidence" establishes that Dadayev pulled the trigger. That same report quotes a source as saying, "law enforcement authorities have identified foreign contacts of the Nemtsov murder suspects, so a theory about a foreign trail is also being actively investigated,"

By tossing out the theory of an Islamist terror attack being the motivation for Nemtsov's killing, the FSB plays to a well worn script when it comes to explaining political assassinations. Don't misunderstand; there have been plenty of Islamic terror attacks in Russia over the years. But obfuscating the truth by presenting Muslim patsies to the Russian public in high profile political murders has been the modus operandi of authorities since Putin came to power.

We will follow the trial of the alleged assassins with great interest.