In the Crimea in the village of Zemlyanny (Ortalan), the security forces on April 1 conducted searches in four houses of Crimean Tatars, including the parents of the journalist of the ATR television channel Gulsum Khalilova. This was announced on his Facebook page by the head of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people Refat Chubarov.
Searches were carried out under the pretext of finding weapons and prohibited items, including prohibited books.
According to Chubarov, the FSB officers in masks searched all the premises in the house of the journalist’s parents and seized all electronic equipment from them, including phones. As a result of the visit of the security officials of the elderly father, journalist Khalil Khalilov, who was bad, was taken to the ambulance to the hospital.
The journalist herself said that her father has hypertension, and he is in critical condition.
“As I found out later, during the search, he could not even get out of bed. And the experience only aggravated his condition, ”she wrote on her page and added that during the search, the ambulance came to her father three times.
Khalilova also said that the security forces did not find anything banned in the house of her parents:
“My dad is 74. My mother is an ordinary woman who just wants peace in her home. Drawn up the protocol “Nothing was found” - and left. And we stayed with the consequences. "
The journalist told the publication ґrati that her father was hospitalized with suspicion of stroke, and he is in the hospital in Simferopol.
Details of searches at other addresses in this village are unknown. Russian law enforcement agencies about the searches on April 1 did not report a strawberry.
Khalilova left the peninsula in 2015. In 2019, the FSB opened a criminal case against her about participation in illegal armed formation (Article 208 of the Criminal Code). The security forces claimed that the journalist joined the Noman Chelebijikhan battalion and provided him with information support. She was arrested in absentia and put on the wanted list. In January 2025, she was also included in the "List of terrorists and extremists" of Rosfinmonitoring.
The journalist herself rejects these accusations and talks about politically motivated persecution. In 2015, Khalilova illuminated the energy blockade of Crimea, in which future volunteers of the battalion participated, they note “ґrati”.
“I went out daily with straight broadcasts, plots and told what was happening within the blockade of Crimea. I exclusively fulfilled my journalistic duties, ”she said after the initiation of the case.
- The Crimean Tatar television channel ATR has been working on the peninsula since 2006. The channel illuminated events in Crimea during the annexation and advocated the preservation of the peninsula in Ukraine. In early 2015, the ATR office was searched, and soon Roskomnadzor refused the television channel to register on Russian law. ATR resumed its broadcasting in the summer of 2015 from Kyiv. The Crimean authorities then threatened the channel reporters with criminal liability.