They beat her, shaved her head and doused her with green paint. Victim of a journalist from Novaya Gazeta, Elena MilashinaAuthor of numerous studies on the subject human rights violation in Chechnya, including a large one documenting the abuse and killing of LGBTQ people in 2017.
She was attacked shortly after arriving in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic. She had gone there to watch the final hearing of the trial, which she sees as a defendant Zarema Musaeva, a woman arrested in January 2022 on charges of assaulting a local police officer. The defendant’s defense attorney Alexander NemovHe suffered the beatings of the attackers.
the threats
On Memorial’s Telegram channel, we read that “while being beaten, they were told: ‘You are warned, leave and do not write'”. Their equipment would also be destroyed.
The Ambush
According to what Nemov told the Chechen NGO “Team Against Torture“The car in which the lawyer was traveling with Milashina would have been blocked by three vehicles carrying one Group of armed and hooded men, along the road that connects the airport to the city center. The two would have been overthrown, brutally beaten, imprisoned kick in the face and threaten yourself with guns pointed at your head. Not only. Their tools, including mobile phones, were taken from them and destroyed.
The conditions of the attacked
The Committee Against Torture announced that after suffering the attack, Milashina lost consciousness several times in the hospital and arrived with her face completely covered in paint. He also suffered multiple broken fingers on both hands and injuries to his skull. Slightly less serious is Nemov’s condition, who instead suffered a serious leg injury, possibly from a stab wound. He and the reporter tried to get the details of the attack to a police officer at the hospital, but failed.
“Both were kicked and beaten with polypropylene pipes. They were blamed for their work, the tribunals and the trials that Milashina had mentioned. This is clearly not an attack by simple gangsters. It was an intimidation attack on her professional activities,” he said Sergey BabenetsLeader of the anti-torture team.
The case of Zarema Musaeva
Zarema Musaeva, reports Novaya Gazeta, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for assault and fraud, as requested by prosecutors. , claims human rights groups believe are false. Evidence is lacking, but the 53-year-old’s case could be directly related to Milashina and Nemov’s aggression. For this reason it is necessary to reconstruct history in order to get a clearer idea of the context in which the mentioned attack took place.
Musaeva, 53, is the mother of Abubakar and Ibrahim YangulbaevAged 29 and 27, two Chechen activists have stood out for their resolute opposition Ramzan Kadyrov, or the man whom Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed ad interim President of the Chechen Republic in 2007. Kadyrov’s work has often been criticized by various humanitarian organizations – including Amnesty International – for his harmful actions against human rights: most notably his campaigns persecution of political opponents and homosexuals, carried out with killings, intimidation and mass arrests.
Abubakar and Ibrahim Yangulbaev had also been targeted by Kadyrov for some time and had to flee abroad. In particular, the main goal of the leader of the Chechen Republic was to silence Abubakar, the older of the two brothers, who received repeated death threats for harsh criticism of Kadyrov and his work as a human rights lawyer in the Chechen Republic’s “Team Against Torture “.
On January 20, 2022, her mother was arrested: Musaeva was in Nizhny Novgorod, before the eyes of her husband – the former Chechen federal judge Saydi Yangulbaev – and her lawyer. The day after the blitz, Kadyrov issued a new, explicit and violent death threat to his children on his Telegram channel, stating that the brothers’ family was “waiting for a place in prison or underground” and that they were not could do longer “Go freely and enjoy life” while “the honor of the Chechens is deeply violated”.
Musaeva was transferred to a Grozny prison for hooliganism and assault on a police officer. An act that many human rights organizations repeatedly branded as “abuse of power” and “retaliation against children”. Even the European Union had asked Chechnya to release Musaeva. His trial began the following August. The verdict handed down today by the court in Grozny «amounts to a death sentence» commented Abubakar Yabgulbaev.
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at Il Gazzettino