The man in the photograph, identified, detained, and taken to court as a suspect of the Moscow terrorist attack by the Russian authorities, is Dalerdzon Mirzoyev, a citizen of Tajikistan and has nothing to do with Rustem Azhiev, from the photograph on the right, the Chechen militant who joined the war in Ukraine on the side of Kyiv in 2022, writes Truthmeter.mk
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We are fact-checking a post on Facebook claiming that one of the assailants involved in the terrorist attack on the 22nd of March in Moscow where more than 140 people were killed, has Ukrainian citizenship and is one of the leaders of the Chechen militants fighting on the side of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2022. The post claims that Rustam Azhiev is better known as Abdul-Hakim al-Shishani.
This detail is quite interesting. If the claim is true, that will be extremely bad for one of the sides… Rustem Azhiev is a Ukrainian citizen. In mid-October 2022, one of the leaders of Chechen militants who fought on the side of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Rustam Azhiev, better known as Abdul-Hakim al-Shishani, received Ukrainian citizenship, states the post.
The left side of the photograph shared in the post appears to be a photograph of the alleged attacker, while the right side shows a photograph of Rustam Azhiev. The post claims that they are one and the same person.
Nevertheless, this claim is not true, specify the fact-checkers from Observador.pt.
Rustam Azhiev, better known by his given name Abdul Hakim al-Shishani is a Chechen militant who fought in the Second Chechen War, together with the Syrian jihadists and joined the war in Ukraine, on the side of Kyiv, along with a group of Chechen fighters in 2022.
Rustam Azhiev is the person on the right side of the photograph, but not on the left-side photo.
On the 22nd of March, a group of four terrorists entered the well-known concert hall “Crocus City Hall” in the suburbia of Russia’s capital Moscow, and started unselectively shooting the crowd thereby killing almost 150 people. The attackers also used incendiary bombs that caused a big fire and the collapse of the building’s roof.
Early Saturday morning on the 23rd of March, Russian President Vladimir Putin informed that 11 suspects were arrested, including four who were directly involved in the attack.
That day Russian media started circulating some information about the perpetrators of the attack. One of the first sources of information was the video released on Telegram by Margarita Simonyan, Russian journalist in charge of the PT channel, showing, allegedly, the interrogation of the suspects, reports Observador.pt.
The video was taken over by some other foreign media, such as the British Mirror.
The photograph appearing on the left side of the post we are fact-checking is a screenshot of that video. Russian authorities officially published the photographs and the identity of the four assailants. According to Russian state-owned media, the accused were named as Dalerdzon Mirzoyev, Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, Shamsidin Fariduni and и Muhammadsobir Fayzov, all citizens of Tajikistan.
The man on the left side of the photograph was identified as Dalerdzon Mirzoyev, a Tajikistani citizen. The attackers were already taken to court in Moscow – and photographed at that moment.
As the New York Times’s visual researcher, Arik Toler, noted on Twitter, not even the usual Russian channels are disseminating the information that seems to have appeared on Twitter and afterward spread on other social networks.
Both men, regardless of the general resemblance of their faces, have some noticeable differences – starting from the deformity of their ears which clearly tells them apart.
According to all of the above-noted, we can conclude that the post is sharing an incorrect claim about one of the assailants of the concert hall in Moscow. The man in the photograph, identified, detained, and taken to court as a suspect in the terrorist attack, is Dalerdzon Mirzoyev, a citizen of Tajikistan and he has nothing to do with Rustem Azhiev, from the photograph on the right, the Chechen militant who joined the war in Ukraine on the side of Kyiv in 2022.
