Prosecutor requests 5.5 years in prison for Zarema Musayeva, mother of persecuted Chechen activists

A prosecutor in Chechen court has requested 5.5 years in prison for Zarema Musayeva, the mother of persecuted Chechen activists, Crew Against Torture reports.

Musayeva is accused of using violence against a law enforcer.

Musaeva is the wife of Saidi Yangulbaev, a retired Supreme Court judge, and the mother of Chechen human rights activists Abubakar and Ibragim Yangulbaev. She has been held in a pre-trial detention centre in Grozny since January 2022 on charges of violence against a law enforcer. Her son says her eyesight deteriorated during the time she spent in custody, and she also suffers from back pain and is barely able to move around. It was revealed in June that she had been admitted to hospital.

On 20 January 2022, security forces came to the Yangulbaevs' apartment in Nizhny Novgorod. They abducted Zarema without allowing her to grab a change of clothes or necessary medicines and took her to an unknown location. She was later arrested for 15 days on an administrative violation as she allegedly “attacked a police officer and almost pierced his eye out.”

Human rights activists linked the abduction of Musaeva with the activities of her son Abubakar Yangulbaev, an ex-employee of the North Caucasian branch of the Committee Against Torture. Ibragim, another Musaeva’s son, was later charged with public calls for terrorist activities.

Chechnya’s governor Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that the Yangulbaevs supported extremism and terrorism, which is why they need to be detained, and in case they resist, “wiped out”. Rosfinmonitoring, a state agency that provides lists of people accused of terrorist or “extremist” activities and books, has added Baisangur and Ibragim Yangulbaev, the sons of Zarema Musayeva, to its register of terrorists and extremists.