The prosecutor's office demanded that the case against eight abducted and killed residents of Dagestan be reopened

The Chechen prosecutor's office has reversed the decision to close the case against eight residents of Dagestan who disappeared on the territory of the republic, and then they were killed on the territory of Chechnya and accused of attacking police officers. Andrei Sabinin, a lawyer for the international human rights group Agora, told Mediazona about this.

Eight residents of Dagestan were kidnapped within one week in the fall of 2016. Some of them were detained by armed people. According to relatives, billing showed that the phones of the stolen people were located near the building of Center “E” in Makhachkala. On the night of October 8-9, police shot two cars with eight people in them on a country road in the Gudermes region of Chechnya. DNA tests showed that it was those who disappeared in Dagestan who died.

Relatives are confident that security forces were involved in the disappearance of the young people.

The decision to dismiss the case under the articles of assassination of police officers (Article 317 of the Criminal Code) and illegal trafficking in weapons (Part 2 of Article 222 of the Criminal Code) was made by the Investigative Committee against the wishes of the relatives of the missing young people. As Sabinin said, he intended to file a complaint against this decision with the Staropromyslovsky District Court of Grozny, but it was not accepted, citing the absence of a termination order. To get it, Sabinin made an appointment with the head of the Investigative Committee’s department for Chechnya, where he was informed that the case had been transferred to another investigator and resumed.

“Mediazona” talked in detail about how eight young people were first kidnapped in Dagestan, and then, when their relatives began to go to rallies, they were shot and burned in neighboring Chechnya.