A man in Dagestan spent two years behind bars on various charges — all because his brother tried to go to Syria — before a Russian court suddenly acquitted him

Police officers detained a man trying to leave Dagestan for a job, and charged him with complicity in the murder of a federal judge

On September 3, 2016, Gadzhi Musayev, a 21-year-old man living in Dagestan, boarded a bus to Moscow, where he planned to catch a flight to Kamchatka. Thanks to some help from people in his village, there was a construction job waiting for Musayev in Russia’s Far East. When the vehicle arrived at Dagestan’s border with Kalmykia, however, police officers forced Musayev off the bus. Without any explanation, they brought him to the nearby town of Yuzhno-Sukhokumsk, where they put him in a holding cell. The next morning, “placing a bag over his head,” officials escorted Musayev to the Dagestani Interior Ministry’s Counter-Extremism Center, according to a report by the local newspaper Chernovik.

“There, they began to ask him whether he knew any members of illegal armed gangs in [Dagestan’s] Shamilsky District. Musayev denied having any connection to them. Then they [the anti-extremism unit officers] began to kick him, beat him with water jugs, and administer electric shocks, forcing him to admit to passing food a couple of times to different members of the illegal armed gangs. He was also named as a witness and an accessory in the murder of Judge Ubaydula Magomedov," Gasan Gasanov, Musayev's lawyer, told Chernovik.

Magomedov, a federal judge in the Shamilsky District Court, was killed in the courtyard outside his home on the night of August 11, 2016. Police linked the murder to Magomedov's professional activities, reasoning that it was a reprisal attack for one of his verdicts in an extremism case. The judge had served on the bench in Shamilsky since 2004.

Gasanov told Meduza that police identified Musayev as a supposed party to the killing because his older brother “had tried to go to Syria.” The brother failed to make it, however, and got “stuck in Turkey”; his current whereabouts are unknown. According to Gasanov, Musayev is not in touch with him. The lawyer says the police detained Musayev because they thought he would also try to reach Syria.

“Musayev's older brother never had anything to do with terrorists, of course — he's just very religious. But Musayev himself isn't all that religious: he smokes and drinks sometimes,” Gasanov says, adding that Musayev's brother decided to go to Syria because the police had told him that, as a Salafi, he was “not going to be allowed to lead a normal life” in Dagestan.

Police officers tortured Musayev into incriminating himself, but not even a federal investigator believed his testimony

According to his lawyer, Musayev was held at Dagestan’s Counter-Extremism Center from the morning of September 3 until the afternoon on September 5. The torture Musayev endured while in police custody left him without the use of one of his hands, he stopped seeing out of his left eye, and he couldn’t walk normally for a month. Doctors diagnosed him with optic nerve atrophy and determined that his partial loss of vision was inoperable. He also lost 14 teeth.

On September 5, Musayev was brought for additional interrogation to Pavel Sechenko, an officer at a local branch of the Federal Investigative Committee. Noticing the bruises on Musayev's body, Senchenko asked if the confessions he signed were true. He then administered two polygraph tests, both of which indicated that Musayev had falsely incriminated himself. “One important factor was that the murdered judge’s son worked in the same police department, and he wanted to find the real killers,” Gasanov says. “Investigator Senchenko worked the case very conscientiously, it seems to me. I think he was on assignment from the Stavropol region.”

On September 7, Musayev was transferred to a pretrial detention center. He was no longer charged with being an accessory to the murder of Judge Magomedov; police now said he’d colluded with armed militants.

Then, Musayev’s lawyer says, the case was taken away from Senchenko and handed to a new investigator named Shamil Abumuslimov. (According to the human rights group “Memorial,” Abumuslimov once demanded a confession from a woman detained for criminal possession of explosives, while the suspect said the explosives were planted by police officers.)

In April 2017, Musayev’s case was transferred again — this time to an investigator from an interdistrict department in Khunzakhsky. Gasanov says this was because Abumuslimov’s office was “worried about performance indicators,” and Abumuslimov supposedly maintained control over the investigation in practice.

After two courts refused to hear Musayev’s case, a third exonerated him

In July 2017, the Shamilsky district attorney’s office referred the charges to a local court, but the judge granted a request from public prosecutors to withdraw the case before it could start. Citing “unconfirmed reports,” the newspaper Chernovik said the judge told the prosecutor privately that he wouldn’t support the charges.

Next, Musayev’s trial was moved to the Gergebilsky district, but in September this court also granted a request from prosecutors to withdraw the case.

“It was just too obvious that the charges didn’t hold any water. The judges simply couldn’t reach a conviction in this case, but neither did they take it upon themselves to acquit [Musayev],” Gasanov says.

Musayev’s lawyer says the case was riddled with contradictions. For instance, the investigators’ indictment accused Musayev of passing food supplies to a militant called Magomedov in March 2014, despite the fact that Magomedov was in jail at that time. There was even an itemized billing statement from Musayev’s mobile phone provider showing that he was at home with his family at the time investigators say he was out, supplying armed militants with food.

In September 2017, the case was referred to Judge Nurmagomed Nurmagomedov at the Buynaksk City Court. On February 1, 2018, the city’s deputy state attorney (a man named Magomed Badtalov) notified the court that he refused to support the charges against Musayev. He was replaced by a prosecutor from the Shamilsky district. On April 27, Judge Nurmagomedov acquitted Musayev.

“Not-guilty verdicts are rare, let alone in a case like this,” Gasanov says. “I was pleasantly surprised by how Nurmagomedov handled the trial. He was very balanced, I’d say, and he really worked to get a handle on the case. It's nice to see a young judge like that.”

Gasanov says Musayev’s first plans as a free man are to get medical treatment for the injuries he sustained in police custody, and only after that will he seek legal redress. His lawyer has already filed a lawsuit with the district attorney against investigator Abumuslimov and the officers at “Center E.”

Meanwhile, prosecutors are appealing Musayev’s acquittal in the Dagestani Supreme Court, which will hear the case within the next two months. “I hope the verdict will stand,” Gasanov says. “It could happen.”

Story by Evgeny Berg, translation by Peter Marshall