RUSSIA: Newspaper Reports Sweeping Purge And Murders Of Gay Men By Police In Chechnya Republic

The New York Times reports:

First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing. Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared from the streets of Chechnya. On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story already circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men.

While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir V. Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale.

The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities.

By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings.

A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.” “You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency. “If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.

More from Crime Russia:



According to a message of a LGBT activist from Chechnya, who remained anonymous for obvious reasons, gays are exposed through provocative posts in social networks. The author claims that those who respond to such messages are then detained or killed.

The publication reports that the detainees include representatives of the Chechen muftiate, among whom there are influential religious figures close to the head of the republic, as well as two well-known Chechen TV personalities.

As reported by sources in the local security services, the so-called ‘preventive cleansing’ began after the reports of LGBT activists from other regions, led by Nikolay Alekseev (GayRussia.ru project) on holding rallies in the cities of the North Caucasus. this information provoked protests and an aggressive reaction among the population of Chechnya.

Meanwhile, the publication notes that the mentioned rallies have not been coordinated. The purpose of filing such notifications is to receive a refusal and then appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.