A Chechen man says he has turned himself in to police in Chechnya after admitting to causing a deadly car accident several days earlier in the Russian capital, Moscow.
In a video uploaded to social media on March 29, Muslim Dzhambekov said he turned himself in "immediately" after Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Russian North Caucasus region, reprimanded him online.
Dzhambekov said he had driven the Mercedes SUV vehicle that slammed into a much smaller Russia-made Niva car in Moscow on March 25, killing a 34-year-old woman and her 14-year-old daughter. A man was also seriously injured in the accident and remains hospitalized.
The video was published on Kadyrov’s accounts on Instagram and the Russian social-media site VKontakte. On his accounts, Kadyrov boasted that Dzhambekov handed himself in a day after the Chechen leader urged him to do so.
It was unclear where Dzhambekov was being held or whether he would be transferred to Moscow to face criminal proceedings.
In the video, Dzhambekov stands in front of the Heart of Chechnya mosque in the Chechen capital, Grozny, and says he is sorry for "what happened."
He also expresses his "condolences to the relatives and friends of the traffic accident’s victims," adding that he left "the accident's site" because he was "in shock and did not know what I was doing."
Earlier, Russian media reports said that the Mercedes involved in the crash belonged to Abdul-Rakhman Dudayev, a Chechen mixed-martial-arts (MMA) champion. He was quoted as saying that he had sold the car last year.
Dzhambekov was previously convicted of robbery and spent nine years in prison, the reports said.