Chechens accused of planning blast in Moscow
Ruslan Isayev
GROZNY, MOSCOW - The Russian special services have blamed Chechens for a planned bomb attack in Moscow. Several men, Chechen nationals, have already been detained.
One of the detainees is Umar Batukayev, a 24-year-old student at the Academy of Economics and Law. His father, Abdul-Rashid Batukayev, believes that his son has nothing to do with what happened. In an interview with the Chechen section of the North Caucasus service of Radio Liberty he said :
"An elderly woman who was out walking her dog on Profsoyuznaya Street found a car in which there were explosives. After that, they began to round up all the young Chechens living nearby, ostensibly to ascertain the owner of the car. My son also discovered that he’d been followed all the way from the school. He asked them what they were doing and they said they were from the Federal Security Service (FSB), and immediately seized him. Then they came to our place and conducted a search, but they didn’t find anything either at our place or on him. It’s an attempt to frame us by making out that he’s the owner of the car. The investigator says they’re just being checked. But the lawyer says they’re being questioned and asked if they know this or that person. It’s just another round of harassment of Chechens, " Batukayev’s father said.
On Wednesday May 9 Russian police announced that a terrorist attack involving a car bomb had been prevented in Moscow. And today the FSB has announced the arrest of a "terrorist group mainly composed of migrants from the North Caucasus”. The group’s members are suspected of complicity in several attacks in the North Caucasus. Criminal investigations are continuing in Moscow and also in other regions of Russia.
The "Chechen trace" – the blaming of persons of Chechen ethnicity for major crimes – was used intensively at the beginning of the second Chechen war in order to prepare the population psychologically for a new military campaign.
(D/T)
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