Three people have been detained in Ingushetia, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in a joint operation by the FSB, Interior Ministry and Investigative Committee. Russian law-enforcement authorities accuse them of involvement in attacks on military personnel and law-enforcement officers in Chechnya in 1999 and 2000. The detainees’ names and ages have not been disclosed.

According to investigators, one of the suspects allegedly took part in an attack on Defence Ministry personnel near the village of Chervlyonnaya in Chechnya’s Shelkovsky district on 4 October 1999. Fifteen servicemen were killed and another 28 wounded. The detainee has been charged with armed rebellion, participation in an illegal armed group and attempting to kill military personnel.

The other two suspects are accused of taking part in an attack on a combined unit of the Perm OMON riot police and military personnel from the Vedensky district commandant’s office near the village of Dzhani-Vedeno on 29 March 2000. Investigators say 43 people were killed and 102 wounded in the attack.

The authorities allege that after the attack, members of the armed group seized 36 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 13 machine guns, three sniper rifles, a grenade launcher and ammunition. Military equipment, property and weapons belonging to the Perm regional Interior Ministry department were also reportedly destroyed or damaged.

All three suspects were detained at their places of residence and remanded in custody.

Criminal cases against alleged members of armed groups that operated during the Russian-Chechen wars continue to be opened decades after the events in question. In April 2023, for example, a court sentenced Khafiz Razzakov to life imprisonment after finding him guilty of taking part in the 2000 attack on a convoy of Perm OMON officers.

As Novy Dosh previously reported, cases involving the deaths of Pskov paratroopers have become a “gold mine”. On 29 February 2000, 84 servicemen from the 6th Parachute Company of the 104th Regiment of the 76th Pskov Airborne Division were killed during an attack in the mountains near Ulus-Kert in Chechnya’s Shatoysky district.

Memorial has previously examined similar criminal cases involving the prosecution of Chechen residents. The cases have been investigated for years by the same group of investigators from the Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee for the North Caucasus Federal District, whose core membership has remained largely unchanged. Human rights defenders have noted that the number of such cases has increased over time.

According to the Memorial Human Rights Centre, wording in the case files is copied and carried over from one criminal case to another, with only the surnames being changed.

In March 2025, Memorial published an analysis of witness testimony in the cases against Alavdi Batykayev and Magomed Alkhanov. According to the human rights group, at least 50 people have already been prosecuted in similar cases, while testimony from classified witnesses has become one of the main pieces of evidence used by the prosecution.

Memorial noted that in court some of these witnesses changed their testimony, became confused about details or said they could not remember the circumstances of the events.

In a separate analysis of Batykayev’s case, Memorial also said the prosecution relied in part on identification from photographs and materials whose contents were not disclosed by investigators. Batykayev himself denied the charges. In September 2024, he was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security penal colony.