Chechnya crimes against humanity
Suleiman Usmanovich Gezmakhmaev of the Chinkhoy teip [Chechen tribal clan] was born in 1989 in the Chechen village of Achkhoy-Martan, about 30 miles southwest of occupied Grozny. “When Dzhokhar Dudayev came to power, I was a year old. When the first war broke out, i was 5 years old. My Father participated in the first war, fought together with Dudaev, Maskhadov, he knew Akhmat Kadyrov. After the second war, my father took a clear position: to have as little in common with the state as possible. He himself never worked in government agencies and did not want his children to work there. My mother divorced my father when I was four years old, she left the republic. According to Chechen customs, the children stay with their father’s relatives.” After grade school, he started working and never went to college. In 2011, he joined the russian occupation police force in the Chechen Republic, “The army was out of reach for Chechens. Construction, driving a taxi, or the police — those were the options,” he says. Gezmakhmaev became a sniper in a police unit named after the russian installed occupation leader Akhmat Kadyrov [or ‘Kadyrovtsy’, known in occupied Chechnya for their use of torture during interrogations] and took part in so-called “counterterrorist operations”
In the service, Gezmakhmaev says he learned that Chechen police finish off wounded militants in the field. “Nobody in Chechnya needs a real, breathing militant — under torture, they can say too much,” he explained. Officers unofficially collected their weapons and used them to provoke extensions of their counterterrorist operations by firing at police checkpoints or military units. Gezmakhmaev says law enforcement rely on so-called “counter terrorist operations” for funding and performance indicators. The police even killed innocent bystanders, sometimes during an actual counterterrorist operation, though it’s easier “simply to kidnap someone and hold him in a basement until his beard grows out, before taking him into the forest dressed as an Islamic militant extremist and eliminating him,” explains Gezmakhmaev.
In 2012, Gezmakhmaev witnessed one of these killings firsthand. During a routine counter terrorist operation one of his fellow officers was on night duty when he heard a man scream. The next morning, there was the sound of gunshots. Gezmakhmaev and several other officers were later informed that an Islamic extremist militant had been killed after resisting the police, but Gezmakhmaev says he recognized the dead man: “It was the same guy they brought to our basement a month ago. He was very pale and completely shaggy.” After this incident, Gezmakhmaev says he started avoiding so-called counter terrorist operation assignments.
Who is Kadyrov afraid of? ….. “
In December 2016, I was among the regiment’s employees who were involved in an order to destroy a group of ‘ISIS militants’ […] who reportedly attacked police officers in Grozny. We traveled to the targets in armored „Uaziks“ and „Urals“ plus armored personnel carriers. But we didn’t even need these vehicles, because it was hard to call it a special operation. Four detainees were brought to Karpinka unarmed, ordered to run from the hill toward the forest and they were shot like rabbits. But even then Kadyrov came after they had already been killed. We needed to guard him when he drove an armored car back and forth under the cameras. Kadyrov rarely came to our regiment, only on holidays or on an anniversary.” ….
REFERENCE The forested area near the village of Karpinsky Kurgan, Zavodsky district of Grozny. On 18 December 2016, a special operation was held in the Karpinsky Kurgan district, which was “officially led by the head of Chechnya” Ramzan Kadyrov. During the special operation, four young Chechens were killed, who, according to the “official investigators”attacked Chechen police officers on 17-18 December 2016.
“I think he’s afraid of his father’s regiment. Before his arrival, we were ordered to take out our service weapons and empty out the cartridges from the clips. They [their weapons] were checked several times before his arrival. When thousands of Chechen police officers gathered at the Dynamo Stadium and everyone talked about Kadyrov’s army, in fact, this army was unarmed. Only Kadyrov’s personal guards had weapons.”
“Chechen police officers are encouraged to catch ‘shaitans’. Once we were promised a million rubles and Toyota Camry. How everyone rushed to look for militants!” [….] “The regiment all of a sudden brought in two or three groups overnight for detention. But I haven’t seen a single regiment employee who ended up with a million rubles or a Camry.”
Legally, the Akhmat Kadyrov Police Patrol Service Regiment lacks the authority to arrest people and hold them in detainment on the unit’s own grounds [in the past, following the first invasion of the Chechen Republic by Moscow’s troops in 1994, these secret prisons were created by russian occupation forces and deemed by the international legal community as being concentration camps also known as “filtration camps”] but officers did it anyway, donning the insignia of other police branches. “All the men in the regiment have a whole set of bars and stripes from different divisions, including the special forces, the riot police, Russia’s Interior Ministry, and their own unit,” Gezmakhmaev told Novaya Gazeta. While he was in the service, Gezmakhmaev says the regiment carried out mass arrests just twice before January 2017: once in 2015 and again in 2016 (when the police carried out extrajudicial executions by beating at least two prisoners to death).
According to Novaya Gazeta, police in occupied Chechnya arrested at least 109 people in special operations in December 2016 and January 2017. Local television reports described the suspects as “terrorists” and members of the “criminal underground.” In late January, officials executed at least 27 detainees, shooting two and strangling the others. Most of those who survived this detention were later sentenced to different terms for so-called “possession of illegal weapons”. Another four of these people, say Novaya Gazeta’s sources, were killed in occupied Chechnya around the same time as part of the republic’s reported campaign against the LGBT+ community in February of 2017.
In early January 2017, Gezmakhmaev’s regiment was ordered to round up persons “suspected of planning an attack against the 42nd Guards Motorized Rifle Division military outpost on the outskirts of the Chechen city of Shali.” Officials soon brought in at least 56 people, most of whom were detained in the police unit’s gym basement (where there just so happened to have barred and locked cells located in) The regiment’s officers, along with “Terek” special forces troops and police from other districts, beat the detainees with rubber hoses and clubs, torturing them with electricity and hanging them upside down by ropes secured on large hooks in the ceilings of these caged cells) and lowering them head first into barrels of water. The torture stopped only when a prisoner confessed or died. Novaya Gazeta first reported about these murders back in July 2017, a few months after the publication, they gave Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee the names of 31 suspected victims and requested a formal inquiry.
Beginning on 14 January, Gezmakhmaev was assigned to guard the prisoners being held in the gym basement. Together with another officer, his friend Suleiman Saraliev, he says they would bring the detainees to the shower when possible and sneak them soap. They’d also let the men pray and asked the regiment’s cafeteria workers for extra food. Rationed just one or two pieces of bread a day, plus maybe a cracker, the prisoners were deliberately starved and kept weak. “They couldn’t walk and would collapse,” recalls Gezmakhmaev, who says his conversations with the detainees during this time convinced him that they were innocent.
There were more than a dozen so-called “insurgent commanders” among the prisoners, all but one of whom ended up dead. Gezmakhmaev says he personally questioned what the officials claimed was “amir” Makhma Muskiev, who later wept under torture and confessed to every crime his tormentors suggested. Adam Dasayev, another supposed commander, “screamed at night like an insane person.” The police also arrested his cousin, Imran Dasayev, jailing him in the basement with a bullet wound in his leg, which they refused to treat, to ensure gangrene.
According to Gezmakhmaev, Dasayev said his leg injury happened when the Russian occupation leader Ramzan Kadyrov “accidentally” shot him. (Multiple other sources confirmed this account to Novaya Gazeta.)
There was a total of 18 people on Novaya Gazeta’s list they handed over to Kremlin officials seeking official inquiry about that had criminal cases opened against them in the summer and fall of 2017, and were added to an international wanted list on charges of “involvement in terrorist groups in Syria”. Nevertheless, in March 2018, the Investigative Committee formally declined to open a criminal investigation at Novaya Gazeta’s request — detectives never returned to these cases following this refusal. Novaya Gazeta, on the other hand, continued its investigation on the basis of official documents from the Chechen Interior Ministry obtained by their journalists. These included tables with the photos and personal data of more than 160 detainees, as well as information on the results of investigations carried out by Chechen occupation security officers. The newspaper’s journalists found that these documents included information on nearly all (26) of the people included on their list. The detainees were photographed in several places against recognizable backgrounds.
For example, Novaya Gazeta’s journalists were able to trace a wall with a distinctive skirting board — as well as a boiler room pipe, to which some of the detainees were handcuffed, — to the Akhmat Kadyrov Regiment. Adam Dasayev, even appeared in a segment aired on Chechen state television on 11 January 2017 (the day after his arrest). In the news report, Dasayev is seen being interrogated by Ramzan Kadyrov himself — sitting next to the Kremlin installed “head of Chechnya” is the commander of the Akhamt Kadyrov Regiment, Aslan Israskhanov. According to Novaya Gazeta, Adam Dasayev is “number 31” in the Chechen Interior Ministry’s table of detainees. Novaya Gazeta’s list also included 12 residents of Chechnya who were “registered” by officers from the SOBR “Terek” — Chechnya’s Special Rapid Response Unit (SOBR) of the Russian National Guard. These detentions are connected to the events of 17 December 2016, when a traffic police officer in downtown Grozny fired shots at a car that struck another traffic officer. There were six people in the car in total: three were killed during the shootout and another three — Madina Shakhbiyeva, Islam Bergayev, and Sakhab Yusupov — were hospitalized with injuries. Bergayev and Yusupov reportedly died of their injuries two days later. However, they both appear in a table of detainees arrested by officers from the SOBR “Terek.” And the medical reports on their deaths are not only identical but also refer to the patients as female. On 20 December 2016, the so-called “Islamic State” claimed responsibility for the attack in Grozny: the group published a video on its website showing 11 Chechens taking an oath of allegiance to terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Bergayev can be seen in the middle of the group, but Novaya Gazeta points out that this recording wasn’t included in the criminal case file. Upon examining similar videos attributed to the Islamic State, the journalists found other recordings in which some of the people from their list first swear allegiance to the Islamic State and then, wearing the same clothes and decorations, renounce the extremist group.
Novaya Gazeta concludes that the recordings were staged to incriminate the men as terrorists. In late January, officers forced the 13 “amirs” to sign declarations that they wouldn’t leave the region and then moved them to another basement on the compound. As Novaya Gazeta reported previously, the men were lined up against the walls of a recreation room where Shalinsky District Police Chief Tamerlan Musaev and Akhmat Kadyrov Regiment Commander Aslan Iraskhanov were playing table tennis. The prisoners were then taken to a neighboring room, where Turpal-Ali Ibragimov, the Shali district administration’s chief of staff, was waiting for them. Behind the door into the room, Gezmakhmaev says he and fellow officer Suleiman Saraliev saw dead bodies. Saraliev was then ordered to bring in Makhma Muskiev. When Gezmakhmaev realized that he was next in line to serve as executioner, he excused himself from duty and returned to the barracks. The next morning, Saraliev described what had happened the previous night: first, Ibragimov shot one or two of the “amirs,” before Commander Iraskhanov decided that it would be better to kill the prisoners without staining and damaging the floor and walls with blood and bullet holes. In the end, Ibragimov’s guards strangled the remaining prisoners with exercise ropes. Saraliev said he was forced to help kill Muskiev.
Saraliev had only been with the Akhmat Kadyrov Police Regiment for a few months when he was ordered to take part in the January 2015 executions. The experience changed him, recalls Gezmakhmaev, “Suleiman told me that he could not forget Muskiev’s face at the moment when he was killed […] He kept saying that he saw Makhma Muskiev in his dreams at night, couldn’t sleep well, got hooked on Lyrica. He became obsessed with reporting to someone about the executions […] He worried that Muskiev’s relatives might seek revenge against him [blood feud].” Gezmakhmaev says Saraliev ultimately decided to talk about the killings to his friend who worked either in the district attorney’s office or the investigative committee. The meeting took place in early March 2017. Saraliev’s friend listened to his story and asked for a week to confer with his supervisors, but that was the last he heard of him. Gezmakhmaev then went on sick leave and didn’t see Saraliev again. After another week, he got a phone call from Saraliev, who was now staying with a cousin. “Don’t believe what they’re saying about me,” he asked Gezmakhmaev. Then Saraliev stopped answering his phone. Gezmakhmaev learned later that “Terek” special forces commander Abuzaid Vismuradov (reportedly one of Ramzan Kadyrov’s childhood friends) had visited the regiment accompanied by “some junkie” who claimed that Saraliev is gay and had stayed with him in an apartment. Afterward, says Gezmakhmaev, Vismuradov summoned Saraliev’s cousin to the regiment’s barracks and asked him plainly: “Are you going to kill him or should we do it ourselves?”
In its report, Novaya Gazeta doesn’t clarify who killed Suleiman Saraliev, but we know he was buried the very next day, “almost in secret,” without so much as a funeral. Gezmakhmaev believes that his friend could have been “dealt with as a gay man, because he spoke [to someone] about the executions of the detained Chechens”. Gezmakhmaev and his family left occupied Chechnya soon thereafter. Here’s what Suleiman Gezmakhmaev wrote in his letter, which Elena Milashina read before she ever met him in Germany: “I also want to note that Abuzaid Vismuradov — the [“Terek”] special forces commander and “Akhmat” sports club president, nicknamed “Patriot” — is friends with [Akhmat Kadyrov Police Regiment commander] Aslan Iriskhanov and rarely visits our regiment. At that time, for about three weeks, beginning on 12 January [in 2017] […] Vismuradov came by almost every day. […] I doubt Iriskhanov would have dared to execute prisoners without direct orders from above, since Vismuradov was aware of all that was happening. It was clear that Vismuradov was in charge of everything, from the arrests to the executions. Also, Vismuradov couldn’t have ordered the killings without approval from Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic.” An interview with a migration officer of June 2, 2017 „Question asked Gezmahkmaev during Germany’s migration interview: What caused your desire to quit [your employment]? Answer: These thirteen people, they were tortured and killed… When I initially realized about the torture and murders, I didn’t want to work there anymore… They tell you you have to torture someone. They watch to make sure whether you’re holding his head underwater, if you’re electrocuting him correctly. If you don’t follow their instructions, they eliminate you or they make up something to accuse you of. For example, in aiding militant extremists or insurgents.”
