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.