According to Kosachev, house members also intend to use their inter-parliamentary contacts for the sake of clarifying the situation with Zakayev's trip.
Zakayev, who is now living in London, visited Berlin January 28-30 at the invitation of Gerd Weiskirchen, foreign-affairs speaker for the German Bundestag's SPD faction. The Chechen-bandit emissary, whose extradition is being demanded by Russia for quite a while now, took part in a public discussion dealing with Chechen peace-process opportunities in the German capital.
The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned Zakayev's visit. The trip's organizers aim to cast aspersions on the Russian leadership's efforts to settle the Chechen situation in line with political methods, the Russian Foreign Ministry's spokesman Aleksander Yakovenko noted. Contacts between German representatives and an extremely dubious person, who doesn't represent the Chechen nation's interests in any way, don't match the current high level of Russian-German cooperation.
The London court refused to extradite the Chechen-separatist emissary to Russia in November 2003. For its own part, the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office indicted Zakayev on 13 counts, including murder, terrorism and hostage-taking.
The British Foreign Ministry subsequently announced a decision to grant political asylum to Zakayev.