Amnesty International activist abducted, beaten and faced mock-execution in Russia
An Amnesty International researcher has said he was abducted, stripped, beaten and mock-executed by masked men who said they were police while observing protests in the Russian region of Ingushetia.
Oleg Kozlovsky, 34, who suffered a fractured rib in the ordeal, filed a complaint to Russia's investigative committee last Tuesday. He has fled the country with his family.
“I've been engaged in social work for more than 18 years and lots of various strange, unpleasant and absurd things have happened to me,” Mr Kozlovsky wrote in a Facebook post on Monday. “I've been conscripted into the army from the street, my door has been broken down, I've been detained as a suspect in a double murder, I've been chased in a car and so on and so forth. But what happened a week ago in Ingushetia was so wild it exceeds everything else.”
Mr Kozlovsky went to Ingushetia, a tiny mountainous region on the border with Georgia, on October 5 to monitor ongoing protests over its controversial territory swap with the neighbouring Chechnya region.
The next evening, an unknown man lured the activist out of his hotel in the regional capital Magas on the pretext that one of the protest leaders wanted to meet with him.
Once he was in the man's car, two men in baseball caps and medical masks got in, punched him in the face and took away his phone, he said.
The kidnappers, who said they were agents of the regional anti-extremism police, demanded to know what he was doing there and whom he had met.
Mr Kozlovsky said he was then forced to strip at gunpoint and hit repeatedly during two hours of humiliation in a remote field.
Threatening to publish footage of him naked, rape him or hand him over to the feared security forces of Chechnya's strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov, the abductors demanded that he become a police informant.
They forced him to lay on the ground, held a pistol to the back of his head, told him to pray and said they were going to shoot him.
After Mr Kozlovsky nonetheless refused to cooperate, they staged another mock execution and threatened to kill his children until he agreed to keep his abduction secret.
He was then taken to a nearby airport and flew back to Moscow the next day. Although his bags were given to him, the men kept his phone and video camera, Mr Kozlovsky said.
The activist has met with the head of Vladimir Putin's human rights council and the human rights ombudsmen of Ingushetia.
The investigative committee, which has not responded to his complaint, could not immediately be reached for comment by The Telegraph.
“It wouldn't be hard to find (the abductors) if they wanted. There are a bunch of cameras all around Magas including in the hotel, fingerprints were left on my things, in the end there is phone billing data,” Mr Kozlovsky said. “But I'm not sure there is the political will to investigate this case.”
He added that he would not be “bullied into silence” and hoped to return to work in Russia.
“This was a disturbingly violent and shocking incident. But the authorities need to know we will not be cowed and intimidated by men who hide behind masks,” said Amnesty International regional director Marie Struthers. “Those responsible for this cowardly attack must be promptly found and brought to justice.”
Thousands of Ingushetians have been protesting a murky agreement to redraw its border with Chechnya in September. Kadyrov's region will reportedly get more territory out of the deal than Ingushetia, including land believed to hold oil deposits.
The authorities in Ingushetia and Chechnya have for years been accused of human rights violations in their efforts to stamp out dissent and combat a simmering Islamist insurgency.
“All human rights defenders are considered terrorists here, that's been established,” Oyub Titiyev, head of the Chechnya office of the respected rights group Memorial, told The Telegraph from behind bars in a Chechen courtroom last month.
The 61-year-old is being tried for marijuana possession in what many have called a political trial.
Activists have been abducted and even killed in previous years. The bullet-riddled body of Natalya Estimirova was found in Ingushetia in 2009 after she had been abducted in Chechnya.
Two activists and six journalists were injured after they were beaten up and their bus was set on fire on the border between the two regions in 2016. The Chechnya office of the Committee Against Torture, which organised the trip, had previously been set on fire.
Activists have come under pressure in other regions as well, and Russia has banned groups including the National Endowment for Democracy, Open Society Foundation and several organisations funded by Putin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky as “undesirable” in recent years.
