New arrest tactics developed in ChechnyaTimur Aliyev, North Caucasus – Security services in the Naursky district have developed new tactics for arresting people, states human rights defender Tamara Kalayeva.
According to her, new mop-up methods have recently become quite common there: A man is arrested in the evening, and under duress and a promise of a suspended sentence or amnesty, forced to sign a confession that he is a member of a rebel group. He is released the next morning----but for ransom. Once relatives pay up, he is summoned to court to face regular sentencing.
Kalayeva says this happens so often that many people in the district live in dread.
In mid-April, Mukhadin Ubayev of the Kalinovskaya village was taken from his home in the middle of the night by members of the Federal Security Service and released for ransom the next morning. A similar thing happened to another man from the village, Dukvakha Saltamuradov.
Both men were summoned to appear in court on May 5. “The court will decide on how much jail time you’ll have to serve,” they were told by the Naursky Federal Security Service department.
Anyone who is arrested and refuses to sign a confession is threatened with being sent to Khankala, Russia's main military base in Chechnya. “And this is where they often disappear,” says Kalayeva.
She is convinced that covert guerrilla operations are being portrayed in order to prove that fierce resistance exists in Chechnya. “The federal troops have to justify their presence in the republic,” Kalayeva says. According to the Naursky Interior Ministry department, eight people in April alone disappeared without a trace in the district.
(O/E,T) |
