Unpunished kidnappings of residents of Achkhoy-Martan and Duba-Yurt

July 29, 2001

***
At four o'clock in the village of Achkhoy-Martan, Khamzat Akhmedovich (Akhmadovich) Umarov, born in 1956, was taken away from his house at 29 Sadovaya St. in an unknown direction.
The Russian military who abducted him arrived in an armored personnel carrier. Within the boundaries of the settlement, they fired at a local resident, who was later taken to a local hospital with a wound. Not reaching 70 meters to the place they needed, the military got off the armored car and continued on foot. At that time, Salavdi Yusupovich Irbaiev, a representative of the humanitarian organization SPSD, which was distributing humanitarian aid in Achkhoy-Martan, spent the night with Khamzat Umarov. According to the latter, the military checked the documents of both and was the first to take the owner of the house out of the room in which they slept. Three or four minutes later, he was also forced to go outside.

The military were dressed in black uniforms and held screw cutters in their hands. From this we can conclude that they were employees of some special unit (presumably the GRU of the RF Ministry of Defense). Before entering the house, they cut the wire of the landline phone. And after they left, they found an unusual hacksaw blade, which was bent almost in half, but did not break. It was they who sawed down the latch of the iron gate to the garden, through which the military entered the yard. Both detained men were also taken there. At the last minute, for some reason, they changed their minds and left Salavdi Irbaiev. The owner of the house was taken away, since then it has not been possible to establish his whereabouts.

The military commandant of the Achkhoi-Martan district, Ibragim Suleimenov, in response to the appeal of his relatives, refused to admit that Khamzat Umarov was taken away from the house by representatives of the Russian security forces and that he could be kept in the military commander's office or the VOVD located on the territory of the regional center. On January 25, 2002, the Achkhoy-Martan prosecutor's office opened a criminal case on the fact of his illegal detention (No. 63008, Article 127, part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Exactly two months later, it was suspended “due to the impossibility of detecting persons subject to criminal liability” (Article 195 part 3 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR).
In November 2001, members of the Russian security forces abducted his older brother, Ramzan Akhmedovich Umarov, born in 1957. As of October 2007, they are both listed as missing.

***
At the Kavkaz-1 checkpoint, located on the Rostov-Baku highway between the Chechen Republic and the Ingushetia, Khampash Aslambekovich Osmaev, born in 1971, was detained and disappeared. Relatives tried to establish the place of his possible detention, but the search did not lead to anything. Employees of the power structures of the Russian Federation serving at this post refused to acknowledge the fact of the detention of a young man.

***
On the outskirts of the city of Shali, on the road leading from the village of Novye Atagi, an armored personnel carrier was blown up. In response, the Russian military carried out a "cleansing operation" of nearby residential areas. After searching the houses, they took away eight people in an unknown direction.

Builders were detained: welders, masons, etc., who worked here for hire. Of these, the father and three sons of the Aduzovs, two people from the Gaitarov family, and two more men, whose names the staff of the HRC "Memorial" could not establish. All of them are residents of the village of Duba-Yurt. In the first days of detention, the relatives could not take any measures to search for them: the military blocked the surrounding settlements and blocked all roads between them.


From the book "People Live Here", Usam Baisaev, Dmitry Grushkin, 2006

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