Chechen prosecutors say they found no evidence of public threats by Islamic theologians against the journalists who reported the police crackdown on gay men

The Chechen Attorney General’s Office says it’s unaware of any public threats against the Novaya Gazeta or Ekho Moskvy journalists who reported the mass detention and torture of local gay men.

According to Anastasia Kovalevskaya, a representative for Amnesty International, Chechen prosecutors recently closed their investigation into alleged threats against the reporters who broke the “gay prison camps” story. “We’re talking about a case where the evidence of the threats is literally public information. Anyone can go and verify these threats,” Kovalevskaya told the news agency RIA Novosti.

What threats? Why did someone threaten these journalists?

Last year, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta called on the government to respond to calls to “massacre journalists” allegedly voiced by Islamic theologians at a meeting convened in the central mosque of Grozny, Chechnya, in early April 2017.

There were reportedly 15,000 people at this meeting, which Novaya Gazeta says adopted a statement declaring that journalists had “insulted the centuries-old foundations of Chechen society and the dignity of Chechen men,” as well as their faith. The participants also allegedly promised that their offenders would be “subjected to retribution, wherever and whoever they are, without a statute of limitations.”