1,000 Chechens 'murdered by Russians'

A leaked Russian government report has accused its own soldiers of murdering more than 1,000 Chechen civilians last year in an apparent admission that discipline has broken down among its troops.

The report discloses the existence of 49 mass graves dating back to 1999, containing some 3,000 bodies. Last year, 1,132 civilians were believed to have been killed by Russian soldiers, renowned for their wanton behaviour and heavy drinking in Chechnya.

The chilling statistics were reported yesterday by the New York-based Human Rights Watch organisation and the French newspaper Le Monde, which have seen the document.

Sergei Fridinsky, Russia's deputy prosecutor-general, confirmed the existence of the graves but said the number of dead was vastly inflated. To arrive at the figures quoted "every murdered person would have had to die five times," he said.

Anatoly Popov, Chechnya's Moscow-appointed prime minister, admitted yesterday that hundreds of civilians had been killed during the three-year conflict but that was "nothing out of the ordinary".

He said: "Yes, there are crimes, kidnappings and some involve servicemen. There's nothing out of the ordinary in that report."

Mr Fridinsky said 300 Russian servicemen were now under investigation for their part in the "disappearances" of hundreds of people during guerrilla fighting in Chechnya last year.

Human Rights Watch has expressed alarm at the rapid increase in the number of civilian abductions since the start of the year and says most victims are never seen again. The leaked report said 76 civilians were murdered and a further 126 abducted in January and February.

The organisation documented 26 abductions between late December and late February. Diederik Lohman, a director, said: "In every case, the last time the victim was seen alive was in the custody of federal forces."

Memorial, the Russian human rights group which has permanent representatives in Chechnya collecting evidence of abuses, said the mass graves point to a centralised system of federal death squads in the republic.

A prominent liberal Russian MP was shot dead yesterday near his Moscow home. Sergei Yushenkov was a vocal critic of the war in Chechnya.

This article has the scent of propaganda all over it. Notice how they use "believed to have been killed"...speculation.

There are plenty of documented cases of Chechen's kidnapping Russian, Jewish, British and other ethnicities, holding them hostage and blackmailing their relatives for randsom - often sending the relatives fingers they'd cut off the victims to show they are serious. And also videos of some hostages being decapitated. GENUINE atrocities by the Chechens.

I'd like to see a good report, not airy speculation, which has the t's crossed and i's dotted.

This piece is so weak compared to REAL & KNOWN cases like these:

World: Europe Chechnya hostage remains flown home

The remains of four engineers, who were killed by their kidnappers in the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya, are being flown home.
Their bodies were handed over to the British ambassador in neighbouring Azerbaijan, before being put on a plane for London.
The four - three Britons and a New Zealander - were captured by guerrillas in October, as they worked on the installation of a telecommunications system, and were later decapitated.
The remains of Britons Peter Kennedy, Darren Hickey and Rudolph Petschi, and New Zealander Stanley Shaw were positively identified by doctors on Sunday...

Chechen kidnappers target Jews for torture

LEV GORODETSKY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
MOSCOW -- A Jewish hostage was beaten to death by his Chechen captors last week in the latest report of brutality against kidnap victims in the North Caucasus.
Michail Kurnosov, the 36-year-old son of a prominent Russian nuclear researcher, was kidnapped in January 1999 from a ski resort in the North Caucasus and held for ransom in Chechnya.
Vyacheslav Izmailov, a retired Russian major who has arranged the release of dozens of hostages in Chechnya, said he had recently tried to rescue Kurnosov.
Chechen guerrillas have been fighting the Russian army for nearly a year. And anti-Semitism has been a feature throughout the Muslim fighters' campaign to break away from Russia.
"We are going to help the people of Dagestan overthrow the pro-Zionist Moscow regime," one of the top Chechen warlords, Shamil Basayev, said last August.
In recent weeks, Russian Federal Security Bureau squads have been freeing more and more hostages, who are reporting the anti-Jewish bias of their Chechen captors.
"They treat Federal Security Service people and Jews the worst," said Alisher Orzaliyev, 22, an ethnic Khazakh from Central Asia, at a news conference in Moscow. Orzaliyev was held hostage for nearly a year in the basement of a house in the Chechen town of Urus-Martan.
In the same basement with Orzaliyev lived 15 prisoners from a variety of national and religious backgrounds.
Oleg Yemelyantsev, 42, an Israeli citizen, was recently freed as well.
Yemelyantsev, who came from Israel to sell his apartment, was kidnapped in April 1998 in southern Russia while driving his car. He was brought to the Chechen mountains, transferred from one gang to another and periodically beaten.
At least four armed gangs fought over him because Israeli hostages are expected to bring a hefty ransom.
"The treatment was very cruel and humiliating," Yemelyantsev said. "Once I was badly beaten on my back with sticks" and "my leg became paralyzed." He added that a young Russian intelligence officer who stabbed one of the gang members during a mock funeral "was stretched between the trees and had his head sawed off while alive. His head was then hoisted on a pole. We had to watch all that."
Yemelyantsev said this particular gang acts with extreme cruelty toward Jews. They're affiliated with the Wahabbites, a militant, Saudi-based Islamic sect active in Chechnya.
He considers himself relatively lucky. He only lost one finger, which was chopped off last August. The footage of the torture was sent to his wife in Israel to support the ransom demands.
As Russian troops neared, the rebels collected their hostages and drove them deeper into the mountains.
"We had to walk in a canyon along a narrow path over a mountain river. Sometimes heavily loaded people slipped off and fell into the river and had to swim and walk in the ice-cold water. But we didn't want to die," Yemelyantsev said.
Even hostages who are freed can run into problems.
Roman Ashurov, 61, a so-called Mountain Jew from the city of Nalchik, was released recently after having spent a year in captivity.
Weak and sick, Ashurov was slowly making his way to Nalchik when he was detained by the Russian security officers and taken to the notorious detention camp of Chernokozovo.
There he met Andrei Babitsky, the journalist for the U.S.-funded Radio Liberty who was arrested in January by Russian troops. Ashurov then disappeared for three weeks in a mysterious prisoner swap.
After learning about Ashurov's case, the journalist talked to the prison authorities. Only then was Ashurov released from the detention camp and allowed to return home.
"I don't think the kidnappings will stop soon. It has become too profitable of a business in Chechnya, and many police officers across Caucasus cooperate with the kidnappers," Izmailov says.
The case of a Jewish businessman Savi Azaryev, who spent some time in the same basement with Yemelyantsev, shows that the plague of kidnappings is spreading outside the Caucasus and into other parts of Russia.
Azaryev was kidnapped in the city of Volgograd, several hundreds of miles away from the Caucasus and brought to Chechnya. His brothers recently paid his ransom after receiving footage of two of his fingers being cut off.

Jewish hostages in Chechen being killed

...Another teen-ager, Alla Geifman, 13, was freed earlier this month in the south of Chechnya. Geifman, the daughter of banker Grigory Geifman, one of the wealthiest businessmen and an active member of the Jewish community in the city of Saratov in southern Russia, was abducted in May near her house by a gang that specializes in kidnappings of children from upper-class families. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $5 million. Grigory Geifman collected a part of the sum and sent a man with the money. The man was killed and the money disappeared. When he failed to produce the next payment, the mobsters cut off two of the girl's fingers and sent them to her father with video footage of the act...

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