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HR news |
New Mass grave with victims of unlawful executions
On January 13 2003 near Petropavlvskij Shosse near Grozny nine (ten) blasted corpses were discovered and later taken to a mosque in the Tolstoj-Jurt settlement (Grozny region) for identification.
On the next day the attorney-general of the Chechen Republic, B. Kravtshenko, said, that the 10 bodies which were found near Petrovlovskij Shosse belong to people who had earlier been abducted by Chechen fighters. Kravtshtenko said that two bodies had been identified: the director of the Goshos Ramsan Kagermanov and the citizen of Grozny Tepsuev. As a consequence the attorney-general of Chechnya started a penal-case investigation according to article 105-2 (killing of two or more people) (RIA "Novosti", 14 January 2002).
However, from the beginning the inhabitants of Grozny suggested that these bodies belonged to people who had "disappeared" in the course of the "cleansings" in the city of Argun in early January 2003.
Later it became clear, that the given information was not correct: 3 bodies were identified, but only one of them belonged to an inhabitant of Argun, who had been taken into costudy by federal forces in the end of 2002.
The body of Kagermanov; the director of the Goshos "Soviet Russia", which is situated in the settlement of Berdykel' of the Grozny rural region, was almost immediately identified. However, in contrast to the statements of Kravtshenko he had not been abducted by rebels but taken into custody by federal forces in the second half of December 2002 near the Prigorodnoe settlement while he was driving a Volga with two of his colleagues. According to Kagermanov's collegues, they were stopped and taken into custody by soldiers (?). All the three of them had to sit in the soldiers' (?) UAS-car, which set off into an unknown direction. Later, Kagermanov's collegues were thrown out of the car while the Goshos director was driven away. His Volga was taken away as well.
Another body belonged to the citizen of Grozny Tepsuev, who had worked for the tax service and who had been taken into custody by federal forces on December 22, as his relatives told the Human Rights Centre "Memorial".
After the blast only fragments remained of the other bodies. According to members of the police forces it will hardly be possible to identify them.
Consequently, the statements of the attorney-general of the Chechen Republic have not been confirmed by the facts. There are serious reasons to believe that all of the identified bodies, found in the mass grave on January 13, belonged to people who had earlier been taken into custody by federal forces and not been abducted by rebels. This suggestion is backed by eye-witnesses of the arrests.
In this context one should recall that in spring 2001 official Russian representatives tried to blame rebels on a pile of human corpses that had been discovered in the Datsha-settlement near Chankaly. Rebel forces were also blamed on a grave at the Chechen-Ingush border near the Goragorsk settlement, as well as on other cases in which all identified bodies belonged to people who had earlier been taken into custody by federal forces.
It is important to note that the people whose bodies have been identified at Petropavlovskij Shosse were taken into custody at different times and in different places. This had also been the case in the two episodes mentioned above. Therefore, it would not be correct to speak of "executive excesses". Rather, so-called "squadrons of death" - criminal organizations, acting within federal law-enforcing structures - still seem to be at work.
Annotation:
The term "squadrons of death" appeared in the 1960s in Brazil. This is how groups of policemen that under protection of their superiors began to "radically" fight crime and to execute (without prior lawsuit or investigation) those, suspected to have commited a legal offence, called themselves. In most cases it was not the big mob that fell victim, but pitty street thieves and homeless people.
Later, the autorities of many Latin American states began to use "squadrons of death" for political ends, i. e. the suppression of opposition and partisan movements.
