Abdulwahid Edelgiriev was about to take his niece shopping in an Istanbul suburb in November 2015 when a car blocked his path. A man leapt out of it and took aim at the Chechen separatist fighter and missed. As Edelgiriev fled, his assailants gunned him down, stabbed him in the neck and left him to bleed to death.

Nearly five months later, on April 8, 2016, two Russian agents were arrested in Istanbul and jailed for their alleged role in Edelgiriev’s murder and in the deaths of seven other Chechen dissidents living in Turkey. The pair carried fake documents identifying them as Alexander Smirnov and Yury Animisov. Moscow’s Rosbalt news agency reported at the time that Smirnov’s real name was Valid Lurakhmaev. He belonged to a Chechen mafia group in Moscow in the 1990s and his specialty was hit jobs.

Today it emerged that both men were extradited to Russia under the terms of an emergency measure adopted in the wake of the July 15 coup attempt that allows for the extradition or swapping of prisoners if it's deemed in the national interest. Less than 24 hours later, Russia freed a pair of Muslim Tatar dissidents and sent them to Turkey. Cumhuriyet named the men as Ilmi Omarov and Ahmet Ciygoz and reported that they were part of a swap. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had called for the Tatars’ release during a recent trip to Ukraine.

The emergency decree numbered 694 was thought to have been crafted in part to secure the extradition by the United States of Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Sunni imam who is accused of masterminding the botched putsch and also that of Reza Zarrab, the Iranian-Turkish gold trader who is expected to appear in a New York federal court today as a star witness for the prosecution in a massive scam to evade US trade sanctions on Iran.