Journalists - Relief Worker - Politicians - Human Right Activist Abductions or Death

A Profile of Arjan Erkel, Head of Mission of Médecins Sans Frontières, abducted in Dagestan

Arjan Erkel

Arjan Erkel, 32 and a Dutch national who, on August 12, 2002, was abducted by three unidentified gunmen in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization that provides medical and humanitarian assistance to victims of war, conflicts and disasters. This assistance is given without political, religious or ethnic discrimination. MSF is independent and is mainly funded by public donations from the 18 countries where it has representative offices. In November 2000, MSF testified before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as to the grave humanitarian situation in Chechnya and denounced the policy of terror conducted by the Russian and pro-Russian authorities. In January 2002 MSF published the above report on Chechnya/Ingushetia. On August 12 of the same year Arjan "disappeared". After 18 months of cautious wordings, MSF finally decided to openly accuse the Daghestani authorities and the Russian secret services to be involved in the kidnapping. A month later, on April 11, 2004, Arjan Erkel was released.


Antonio Russo, an Italian Freelance Journalist murdered for his Reports on Chechnya

Antonio Russo

Antonio Russo was an Italian freelance journalist documenting the use of illegal chemical weapons in the Chechen war. He has been tortured and killed on October 16, 2000. His body has been found 80 kilometers from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. After investigations suspects fall on Russia's FSB (former KGB secret services). He was a member of the Transnational Radical Party which defends the Chechen cause as NGO at the UN and about that time entered in conflict with UN's Russian representatives. Read the story of Antonio Russo.

Some other cases of murder, abduction or ill-treatement (chronological order - more to find in the press releases):

  • Slovak student and aid worker Miriam Yevikova, was kidnapped in the Northern Caucasus in early June and has been freed on November 23 2004. Yevikova, a student at Charles University in Prague, worked for the Prague-based Organisation for Aid to Refugees (OPU) in the Czech Republic. In late May, she spent a few days in the southern Russian town of Pyatigorsk; from her hotel she phoned friends in Nazran, asking them to meet her at the Ossetian-Ingush border. However, she did not show up there at the appointed time. Soon after, however, OPU received a ransom request for one million dollars, a sum this small NGO was unable to pay. Miriam Yevikova had made several visits to the Northern Caucasus. In the Czech Republic she was mainly concerned with the problems of Chechen refugees and wrote articles for one of the Czech newspapers. Miriam Yevikova

  • Nikolai Girenko -- prominent human rights defender, Professor of Ethnology and expert on racism and discrimination in the Russian Federation -- was shot dead on 19 June 2004 in his home in St Petersburg. He was aged 64. According to reports, Nikolai Girenko was approaching the front door of his apartment to answer the doorbell when he was reportedly shot through the door with a shotgun. He was Head of the Minority Rights Commission at the St Petersburg Scientific Union and had conducted several studies for Moscow and St Petersburg authorities on neo-Nazi and skinhead groups in the Russian Federation and had repeatedly warned that such groups were on the rise.

  • On 16 January 2004, the dead body of the human rights activist, Aslan Davletukayev, a volunteer for the Interregional Public Organization "Society for Russian-Chechen Friendship", was found on the roadside near the town of Gudermes. The body had traces of violent death and torture. SRCF "rates the abduction and murder of Aslan Davletukayev as another act of state terror against people of the Chechen Republic and as another episode in the chain of physical extermination of political and ideological opponents by the regime. It must be noted that Aslan is already the fourth activist of the Society murdered since 2000. And the complicity of Russian security agencies in at least two of these four deaths is evident and in the other two seems to be the most probable. One more volunteer for the Society, Artur Akhmatkhanov, has been in the missing list since April 2003, when he was abducted by Russian servicemen in the Chechen town of Shali. It is needless to say that no one of the above-mentioned crimes has been investigated and no one of the guilty has been punished."

  • Magomedsalikh Gusayev, the minister for ethnic policy, information and public relations in Russia's internal North-Caucasian republic of Dagestan, was killed on August 26, 2003 in the centre of Makhachkala, in Daghestan. Radical Islamists with links to the Chechen rebels could have perpetrated the attack on Gusayev. The minister is an old foe: after Shamil Basayev's assault on Dagestan in 1999, Gusayev launched a successful information campaign against the extremists.

  • Former State Duma deputy Nadyrshakh Khachilayev was killed in Makhachkala, Daghestan on 11 August, 2003. Not long before his death Khachilayev met with a high-ranking Dagestani official who openly warned Khachilayev that he would be ''ground into dust'' should he nominate himself for a post in the lower house. According to another lead, the murder of the insurgent Khachilayev was the result of a blood feud after the events in Makhachkala in May 1998. Then, armed supporters of Khachilayev captured the building of the State Council of Dagestan and hoisted green flags of Islam on its roof. Nadirshakh and his brother Magomed, leaders of the Lak national movement, led the armed mutiny and for over 24 hours had control over the government compound. Both brothers were later also charged with complicity in the murder of three policemen during riots.

  • Alikhan Guliyev, an Ingush journalist, who worked for Russia's TVTs channel, was gunned down in Moscow on 18 Jul 2003. Several times he was a candidate in the elections for the MP of Ingushetia. Many times went Guliyev to Chechnya, and for a while was a hostage. Guliyev accused the head of  Ingush MVD Khamzat Gutseriyev of breaking the rules of pre-election agitation and rules of financing of the pre-election campaign.

  • Ali Astamirov, AFP reporter, a Chechen who used to work in television in the Chechen capital Grozny and has been with the agency for over a year, was kidnapped in Ingushetia's largest city Nazran by three armed men, two of them masked on July 4, 2003. Already in December 2002 Astamirov accused the FSB secret police of intimidating him and his family.

  • Vakhayev, 24-year-old, a Chechen worker of Czech humanitarian organization People in Need Foundation (PINF), was shot dead in the Chechen capital of Grozny on Sunday, June 29, 2003. The People in Need Foundation is one of the foreign humanitarian organizations operating directly in Chechnya. It launched its activities in Chechnya and Ingushetia during the first Russian-Chechen war and has been present in the region again since 2000 (see also Ibragim Zyazikov's case).

  • Zura Bitiyeva, human rights activist, and three of her family members were shot dead on 21 May 2003, in the village of Kalinovskaya, according to the Society of the threatened Peoples, by Russian death squads.

  • Murad Muradov who worked for the Chechen civic group "Let's save our generation": on the evening of April 28, 2003, Russian police from a checkpoint near the village of Prigorodnoye, Grozny region, detained and took him away in an unknown direction.

  • Sergei Yushenkov, one of Russia's leading liberal lawmakers was shot dead in an apparent contract killing outside his apartment in Moscow on 17 April, 2003. Yushenkov was one of the founders of Russia's first post-Soviet democratic movement and a staunch supporter of human rights and critical on the policy in Chechnya. A rare vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, his killing is seen by many as an attack on the country's democratic values.