In Chechnya, the court extended the arrest of the head of the local branch of Memorial for six months

In Chechnya, the Shali City Court extended the arrest of Oyub Titiev, the head of the local branch of the Memorial Human Rights Center, until December 22. Mediazona reports this with reference to lawyer Pyotr Zaikin.

Earlier, the Supreme Court of Chechnya extended Titiev’s arrest until July 25. According to Zaikin, the Supreme Court did not have the right to do this, so the city court later extended the arrest.

• The head of the Grozny branch of the Memorial Human Rights Center, Oyub Titiev, was detained on January 9. In the morning he was stopped on the road from the village of Kurchaloy to the village of Mayrtup. Police allegedly found a bag of drugs in his car and took the man to the station. When Titiev complained that the detention was illegal, the police officers told him: “If you want it according to the law, it will be according to the law.” The human rights activist was forced to drive towards the village of Mayrtup and was detained again - a “legal detention” was staged.
• Two days later, Titiev was arrested and accused of drug possession (Article 228 of the Criminal Code). The human rights activist himself stated that the drugs were planted on him.
• On January 19, a search was carried out at the organization’s Grozny office. During the investigation, police found cigarette butts that looked like cigarettes that had been gutted and then filled with something. However, none of Memorial’s employees smokes. Journalists coming to the office do so exclusively on the balcony, putting cigarette butts in paper envelopes and not in an ashtray.

On March 13, an expert from the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Chechnya came to the conclusion that the two seized rolling papers contained marijuana. On March 29, the investigator refused to grant the request of Titiev’s lawyer to request recordings from surveillance cameras, which, according to the human rights activist, should show how the police first took him to the police department, and then took him back to the road, where they staged a search of the car and the discovery of drugs. On May 18, it became known that his personal belongings were missing from the evidence in Titiev’s case. In addition, the handle and lock of the human rights activist's car were damaged - the door opened without a key. A video recorder and expensive equipment that tracks the route and location of the car disappeared from the car. * On May 24, the investigation reported that it had found no reason to consider the drugs allegedly found in Titiev’s car to have been planted.