Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Milashina, who was attacked in Grozny in July on her way to the verdict Zarema Musaeva, refused to go to the next hearing in the case of the mother of the authors of the opposition Chechen telegram channel 1ADAT. This is the subject of her column “We are not soldiers. We are journalists.”
Two days ago, the human rights organization Team Against Torture reported that the Novaya Gazeta columnist was going to come to Grozny again, despite the attack in the summer. “Unfortunately, human rights activists of the “Team Against Torture” They didn’t ask my permission whether they could make public information related to my work and my safety,” Milashina wrote.
According to the journalist, after information appeared on the website of the Supreme Court of Chechnya about the date of consideration of the appeal against Musaeva’s sentence, she decided to contact the regional ombudsman Mansur Soltaev. In July, he said that he could have ensured Milashina's safety if she had announced her visit in advance.
When he tried to contact the Commissioner for Human Rights in Chechnya, he did not answer Milashina. On September 8, Soltaev’s assistant Timur Utskayev contacted her and said that the ombudsman was at war in Ukraine, and it was unknown how many days later he would return from there. As the Novaya Gazeta columnist is sure, despite Soltaev’s absence on site, the publication could resolve the issue of her safety together with Tatyana Moskalkova.
“But then the lawyers of the “Team Against Torture” intervened in the matter, representing my legal interests in a criminal case of assault, and as a result, I was destined for the role of a red rag, and Ramzan Kadyrov — an angry bull,” Milashina explained her decision to refuse trips. She noted that she was not going to fight with the head of Chechnya — “We are not soldiers. We are journalists.”
On the morning of July 4, a few hours before the announcement of the verdict for 54-year-old Musaeva, the taxi in which Milashina and lawyer Alexander Nemov were traveling from Grozny airport was attacked by a group of men in balaclavas. They beat a journalist and a lawyer, threatened to kill them, put a gun to their head, took away and destroyed their equipment.
As Memorial noted, during the beating Milashina and Nemov were told: “You were warned. Leave here and don’t write anything.” They never made it to the meeting, and Zarema Musayeva was sentenced to five and a half years in a general regime colony in the case of violence against a security officer (Part 2 of Article 318 of the Criminal Code).
Doctors recorded a closed craniocerebral injury and fractures of the journalist's hands, and the lawyer had multiple hematomas, bruises and a knife wound to the leg. Investigators in Chechnya initially opened a case under articles of causing harm to health of moderate and mild severity (Articles 112 and 115 of the Criminal Code), but three weeks later they opened another one — already under six articles of the Criminal Code, including robbery and obstruction of a journalist’s work. In the two months since the attack, no identification or arrest of suspects has been reported.
A Novaya Gazeta journalist was brutally beaten in Chechnya » Elena Milashina and lawyer Alexander Nemov. The main thing