Three Chechens shot by local police in Assinovskaya
Beybulat Polonkoyev
ASSINOVSKAYA, Chechnya – Late on the evening of November 15 three Chechen residents of the village of Assinovskaya in Sunzhensky district were shot by local police.
The victims were Islam Makhauri (b. 1987), a native of Assinovskaya, Vakhid Temirkhanov (b.1987), a native of the village of Alkan-Kala, Groznensky district, and Khamzat Vidayev (b. 1989). a native of the village of Gekhi, Urus-Martansky district. Vidayev died in hospital on the following day.
On the evening of November 15, for reasons that are still unknown, four young residents of Assinovskaya put on masks, armed themselves with an air rifle and telescopic sight, and went out on the street to frighten people. They demanded to see the documents of their peers, explaining that a curfew was now in force, and proceeded to behave in a joking, hooligan-like fashion.
At that moment three friends had come out to top up their mobile phone cards at a local computer store. When they were about 70 metres from the home of one the victims, Islam Makhuri, this group of four young men approached them. In the course of the skirmish that followed, police officers from the neighbouring village of Sernovodskaya arrived and told them all to lie on the ground. The four hooligans dispersed, and the Chechen policemen, who in the darkness were unable to work out what was going on, shot the three friends at point-blank range.
On hearing the shots, local residents, including relatives of Islam Makhauri, came running out, whereupon the policemen beat a retreat. Then other officers from the same police station arrived on the scene and took the young men to the Sunzhensky district hospital in Ordzhonikidzevskaya, Ingushetia.
Explaining their behaviour, the policemen from Sernovodskaya told Prague Watchdog’s correspondent: "We received information that there were shaytany (the derogatory name given to the mujaheddin by Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and adopted by law enforcement personnel) there, and we came to arrest them." The policemen acknowledged that they had made a mistake in the dark. "The times are such that our people are really just objects of prey, and any delay, if they really were guerrillas, could have resulted in some of our guys being killed. Taking into account the fact that someone from the village had phoned to report seeing a group of armed men in masks, our officers opened fire. "
With the help of Assinovskaya’s administrative head it proved possible to detain one of the perpetrators of the tragedy, Nazirbek Terkhoyev, and the hooligan then revealed the identities of the other three, all of whom turned out to be young Assinovskaya residents.
Meanwhile, the father of Islam Makhauri, who was wounded in the incident, said that if local people had not come running in time, the present condition of the victims would have been much worse: the police would have placed a grenade close to them or done something else to justify the killing, as often happens in such situations.
Ismail Makhauri also totally refutes the attempts by some media to connect his son with the members of illegal armed groups: "My son Makhauri is not a guerrilla. He was working with the other lads at a building site, and half the village can confirm that. The Sunzhensky police shot him by criminal mistake."
The relatives of Temirkhanov and Vidayev also confirmed that the young men were not members of any illegal armed groups, were not on the wanted list, and were working on the construction of private houses. Temirkhanov is a third year student at the Moscow branch of the Academy of Security and Law. (Translation by DM) (T)
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