November 17, 2001

***
At 10.30 on Zhukovsky Street in Grozny, near the “Banya” stop, unknown persons attempted to blow up an armored personnel carrier. The military opened random fire from machine guns in different directions. Whether intentionally or accidentally, a city bus on route 29 passing by also came under fire. The driver was seriously injured, but managed to drive the bus to safety and stop it. The name and place of residence of the deceased driver of the Memorial Human Rights Center are unknown.

***
On Pervomaiskaya Street in Grozny, two military men staged a walk with machine gun fire. They walked from the checkpoint located at the intersection of B. Khmelnitsky and V. Mayakovsky streets. Having fired the cartridges, we sat down next to the old woman selling seeds and started a conversation with her. At that moment, a riot police officer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Chechen Republic approached them. Realizing that the soldiers were drunk, and showing restraint and considerable powers of persuasion, he escorted them to the place of duty.
The civil administration of Grozny several times raised the issue of eliminating the above checkpoint, believing that it does not play a significant role in ensuring the safety of city residents. On the contrary, the military personnel serving on it often themselves became a source of threat.

***
Near the village of Goyta, at a checkpoint allegedly for violating the so-called curfew, Aslanbek Shapaevich Tasuev, born in 1970, was detained. He is a resident of Urus-Martan, lived at the address: st. Sedogo, 4. According to Malika’s sister, he did not take part in the hostilities.

Over the next two weeks, he was kept in a temporary detention facility at the VOVD. Upon his release, they took a receipt from him that he had no complaints against law enforcement officers. However, there, on the territory of the VOVD, he was detained by Russian security forces. They took him away in an unknown direction in a VAZ-2106 car with registration plates in which only the first letter remained unknown: 704 AA 95/rus.

The temporary detention center employees, whom his relatives contacted, stated that they had released him and that there should be no complaints against them. According to them, those who carried out the repeated arrests are also unknown to them. The mother of the missing young man contacted the Urus-Martan branch of Vladimir Kalamanov’s bureau. But already on December 5, 2001, his body was found in the Chernorechensky forest south of Grozny. POM employees went there. As it turned out, the body was mined. When the sappers disarmed the booby trap, another circumstance became clear: traces of terrible torture remained on the body of the dead man. He probably died from thirteen stab wounds to vital organs, including the heart.

Relatives of Aslanbek Tasuev did not file an application with the prosecutor's office, believing that they would still not be able to achieve an objective investigation and punishment of the criminals.

From the book “People Live Here”, Usam Baysaev, Dmitry Grushkin, 2006.