Russian soldiers mop up Chernorechye in Grozny, detain eight peopleRuslan Isayev, North Caucasus – Russian servicemen detained eight people including three girls during a mop-up operation in the Chernorechye neighborhood in the Zavodskoy district of Grozny several days ago.
The operation, which involved a large number of military vehicles and carriers, was carried out on July 16 in the evening. The mop-up zone included apartment houses on the Mogilevskaya, Verkhoyanskaya, Pyatigorskaya, and Vyborgskaya Streets.
The soldiers broke into flats without introducing themselves or explaining the reasons for their actions, and behaved in a very rough manner. The afflicted residents said the mop-up was carried out by Russian soldiers, not by members of local law enforcement agencies.
All the eight detained people were loaded into trucks and driven off in the direction of the military garrison. Malika Zaurbekova, Fatima Zaurbekova, and Ayza Impiyeva said what happened next:
“They took all of us, men and women, from Chernorechye in one military truck within a convoy of vehicles. The journey lasted about half an hour with stops. They put black plastic bags over our heads and sealed the positions of our eyes with Scotch tape. When we arrived, they took us up some stairs and placed us in a room. They laid us face-down on the floor. The youths were in the room with us. We heard how they were beaten and insulted.
We were interrogated one by one. They wanted to know where are the guerilla fighters. They showed us photographs of people and asked whether we knew them. They also asked Ayza why Khava Barayeva (the first woman to carry out a suicide attack at a Russian military post in 2000) blew herself up.
They kept us in this position till the morning. They gave us nothing to drink or eat. When one of the youths asked for water, they refused and offered it to us instead - but we refused. This made the soldiers furious and they started shouting vulgar curses. Yelling “So you know them and you ganged up with them!“, they hit Malika in the back with the butt of a sub-machine gun. In the morning at daybreak they took us in a car and dumped us at the outskirts of Grozny on Staropromyslovskoye road.”
The detained girls claim they were not abused too harshly only because some of the soldiers were quite upset that women had been brought in. There was a big quarrel between them because of this, the girls said.
The fate of the other detainees remains unknown. According to some sources, two of them – Latayev and Aliyev – managed to escape. The soldiers opened fire at them. Their whereabouts are still unknown. There is no news about the remaining three – Kagirov, Shakhgiriyev, and Nakayev.
The following day after these events local residents discovered two bodies in a pit at the Minutka Square in the center of Grozny. The dead bodies, which had no clothes, had clearly visible gunshot wounds, including in the region of the head (probably final shots). One of the corpses had the lower part of the body missing. Most probably the unknown men were first killed and then dumped in the pit, after which a hand-grenade was thrown in there.
(D/T) |
