The Investigative Committee of Chechnya refused to initiate a case of kidnapping and torture of an opposition chat moderator

The Department of the Investigative Committee for Chechnya refused to open a criminal case on the kidnapping and torture of the moderator of the Chechen opposition telegram chat Salman Tepsurkaev. This is reported by the "Committee against Torture".

According to the department's notice, the case was not initiated due to the absence of a crime event. Detailed reasons for the refusal are not included in the notice. The Chechen Investigative Committee issued a decision on this on October 15, the same day that it received the verification materials from the Administration of the Krasnodar Investigative Committee. Krasnodar investigators handed over the materials to their colleagues in connection with the fact that the car of the kidnappers crossed the border of Chechnya.

According to Dmitry Piskunov, head of the North Caucasian branch of the "Committee against Torture", in order to assert that there was no crime, the investigators had to obtain confirmed information about the whereabouts of the abducted person. The whereabouts of Salman Tepsurkaev is unknown.

The title and text of the news has been changed. It was previously stated that Tepsurkaev was the administrator of the 1ADAT channel itself, and not the channel's chat.

• On September 6, in Gelendzhik, Salman Tepsurkaev, moderator of the telegram channel chat about human rights violations in Chechnya 1ADAT, was kidnapped. According to the Committee Against Torture, he was taken to Chechnya in the car of an acting employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Tepsurkaev was taken to the Terek SOBR base in Grozny, wrote Novaya Gazeta . The next day, in the chat of the 1ADAT channel, a man with the nickname “Hunter” uploaded a video in which a young man who calls himself Salman Tepsurkaev repents of being the administrator of a channel where they scold the authorities. The young man, who is shown completely naked in the video, sits down on a bottle after confessing.
• In Chechnya, it is not uncommon for people to be forced to publicly apologize for criticizing the authorities , for spreading information about violence by government officials, or even for complaints. on the air of the state television company ChGTRK Grozny For example, in May, employees of a hospital in Gudermes apologized and admitted their complaints about the lack of personal protective equipment were unfounded. According to opposition blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov, the video of a naked young man sitting on a bottle is “something extraordinary even for Kadyrov’s Chechnya.”