At the checkpoint «Isilkul» in the Omsk region on the border with Kazakhstan, a 19-year-old Chechen Yasin Khalidov, who served in the republican departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the National Guard and participated in the war in Ukraine, was detained. This is reported by Novaya Gazeta.
Khalidov, the son of an FSB officer, began serving in the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the age of 17, although at that time he did not have a school certificate. He, according to the publication, also participated in the detention of residents of Chechnya, «having a penchant for extremism.»
In May 2022, he was transferred to «transport OMON» of the National Guard, and in September they were sent to Ukraine. There, according to the newspaper, he «tried to quit his job», explaining this by the need to care for his sick mother after the death of his father.
After the end of his business trip in January 2023, according to Novaya Gazeta, Khalidov was “detained due to suspicions of disloyalty” and held in “one of the units of the Chechen police.” He was threatened with persecution under the article on terrorism «if he does not stop his attempts to quit the service.»
A Chechen escaped from there at the end of January and left the republic. Khalidov turned to the administrators of the Chechen telegram channel 1ADAT, brothers Ibragim and Baisangur Yangulbaev, and in exchange for a promise of help with the evacuation from Russia, he told them about his work in the Chechen police and his participation in the war in Ukraine.
Before Khalidov left the country, the authors of 1ADAT announced the release of his story as the “investigation of the century”, and on April 2 they released the 26-minute video itself. The video mainly talked about abductions in Chechnya, as well as the service of Chechen units in Ukraine, including at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.
In the video, Yasin Khalidov himself was not mentioned by name, but was called a man who “for the last seven years was an operative and recruiter in Kadyrov’s structures, where he was engaged not only in abductions and torture, but also provoked teenagers to single attacks.” The 1ADAT video is accompanied by screenshots of correspondence between alleged employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and filming, some of which was made by Khalidov in Ukraine.
Three relatives of the Chechen — a mother, a younger brother and an uncle — along with another acquaintance of the family were detained after the announcement of the video, says Novaya Gazeta. They were «subjected to physical and psychological pressure», demanding to reveal the location of Khalidov.
The former policeman himself was detained at the border with Kazakhstan on May 20 at about 12:20 local time and was interrogated for about five hours. After that, the border guards of the FSB handed him over to the officers of the criminal investigation department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Omsk. They subsequently clarified to Novaya Gazeta that they were going to hand over Khalidov to the Chechen police, who put him on the wanted list.
According to Novaya Gazeta, the authors of the opposition channel blocked Khalidov in messengers, and in response to a question about his detention from human rights activists, they answered: .
1ADAT, after the article was published, clarified that they were contacted by representatives of the Chechen organization Vayfond, which works abroad, to which they recorded a four-minute audio message in Chechen with separate phrases in Russian.
Both in an audio message to human rights activists and in a separate post about the Novaya Gazeta article, the authors of 1ADAT claim that they have «carried out their own verification» of Khalidov's story. According to 1ADAT, the Chechen was «an ardent Kadyrov mole in his teens» and a «recruiter.» The reason for his detention in January 2023 was not an attempt to be fired while serving in Ukraine, but the fact that he “tried to earn money on the side.”
“Yasin was just afraid for his life from which he tried to run away. After that, he was put on the federal wanted list long before our publication. It was then that everything became clear with Yasin,” they explained to 1ADAT the reason for publishing Khalidov’s story before his emigration. “It turns out that with another false article Elena Milashina is just trying to denigrate [us],” they added.
Mediazone is not managed to find Yasin Khalidov in the database of the federal wanted list of the Ministry of Internal Affairs at the time of publication of the news.
Updated at 14:48 and 18:35. Added 1ADAT comment and details about the detention of the ex-cop.