At the end of December last year, five Chechens living abroad and publicly criticizing the Chechen authorities — Tumso Abdurakhmanov, Khasan Khalitov, Mansur Sadulaev, Minkail Malizaev and Aslan Artsuev, — announced the abduction of their relatives in Chechnya. In total, we were talking about several dozen people who at once — on the night of December 22 — disappeared from their homes and stopped communicating.
They included not only adult men, but also old people, women and minors. In addition, two relatives of Tumso Abdurakhmanov's wife, who live in Astrakhan, according to the blogger, were summoned to the police at their place of residence — allegedly for interrogation in a fraud case — and then handed over to the Chechen police.
Three days later, Abubakar Yangulbayev, a lawyer for the Nizhny Novgorod human rights organization «Committee Against Torture», reported the detention of relatives living in Chechnya, both on the father's side and on the mother's side. These people disappeared on the same day as the relatives of Abdurakhmanov, Khalitov, Sadulaev, Malizaev and Artsuev.
On December 28, Abubakar Yangulbaev himself was brought to the Pyatigorsk police department. He was interrogated in the framework of a criminal case initiated in Chechnya under Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (public calls for terrorist activities, public justification of terrorism or propaganda of terrorism). A search was conducted in Yangulbaev's apartment in Pyatigorsk, the sanction for which was issued by the Factory Court of Grozny. Abubakar Yangulbaev was detained and interrogated by employees of the Center for Combating Extremism of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Chechen Republic with the participation of Pyatigorsk policemen. During the search, a laptop and a phone were confiscated from Yangulbaev, access to which (passwords) he was forced to disclose under the threat of forced export to Chechnya.
Abubakar Yangulbaev. Freeze frame
After interrogation, Yangulbaev was released and left Russia the same day.
In a conversation with a Novaya Gazeta correspondent, Abubakar Yangulbaev could not name the reason why he was allowed to leave the country. But the events that took place on January 20 in Nizhny Novgorod may provide an answer to this question. On that day, Chechen police officers, with the assistance of employees of the Main Directorate of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation for Nizhny Novgorod, tried to detain Abubakar Yangulbaev's father and mother, Saidi Yangulbaev and Zarema Musaeva. And, most likely, they were the main goal of the Chechen policemen. The premature detention of their son could hasten the evacuation of the older Yangulbaevs from Russia — it should have happened any day.