The Fifth Cassation Court of Pyatigorsk commuted the sentence of 54-year-old Zarema Musaeva, the mother of the authors of the Chechen opposition telegram channel 1ADAT; Instead of five years, she was sentenced to four years and nine months in a penal colony. A SotaVision correspondent reports this from the courtroom.
Last summer, Musaeva was sentenced to five and a half years in a general regime colony in the case of fraud and the use of violence against a security officer during transfer (part 3 of article 159 of the Criminal Code and part 2 of article 318 UK). Later, the Supreme Court of Chechnya commuted the sentence to five years in a penal colony.
The woman’s lawyer, Alexander Savin, asked the court to overturn the verdict of the first instance, as well as to drop the charges against her on both counts, since his client did not commit fraudulent acts, and the examinations differently describe the mechanics of inflicting injury on the policeman. As SotaVision reports, this, according to the lawyer, means that there is no clear evidence of an attack.
Musaeva is the mother of former Committee Against Torture lawyer Abubakar Yangulbaev and two authors of the opposition telegram channel 1ADAT, Ibragim and Baysangur Yangulbaev. The channel talks about abductions of residents of the republic by police and regularly criticizes the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. In the summer of 2022, the Ministry of Justice included 1ADAT in the register of “extremist” organizations.
The Yangulbaev brothers said that they and their father were kidnapped and tortured in 2015 and 2017 because of their criticism of the Chechen authorities. In January 2022, Chechen security forces kidnapped Musaeva from her home in Nizhny Novgorod under the pretext of interrogation in a fraud case and eventually accused her of attacking police officer during transfer to Grozny.