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INGUSH ANGER OVER SUMMARY KILLINGS
[04:50 pm] 07 April, 2007
People in Ingushetia blame a series of extrajudicial killings on
security officials from outside their region.
People in the North Caucasian republic of Ingushetia have expressed
outrage at the killing of a local man, which they say is only the
latest in a string of extrajudicial executions they blame on security
service agents from outside the autonomous republic.
Early on March 15, a group of armed men in camouflage gear arrived in
armoured vehicles to detain Husein Mutaliev, 26, at his house in the
town of Malgobek.
Mutaliev’s mother, sister and neighbours said they saw him being taken
outside the gate of the house and beaten up. They say he attempted to
escape, but was shot in the head and fell down. The men then loaded
him into one of the vehicles and drove away.
Husein’s brother Hasan followed the men in his own car as far as
Ingushetia’s border with neighbouring North Ossetia. The Ingush
traffic police at the frontier checkpoint told him that the armed unit
had produced identity cards showing them as agents of Russia’s GRU
military intelligence, and were allowed to pass.
The local authorities returned Mutaliev’s dead body to his family the
next day.
He leaves behind a wife and three-month-old baby.
"The masked soldiers broke into our house without a search warrant,
they behaved badly and swore. When I asked them who sent them, they
answered, laughing, ‘Putin sent us’," the dead man’s mother Makka
Mutalieva told IWPR. "I hope the president will punish them severely
for these words… for using his name while committing crimes, doing
violence and killing people. Fourteen years of war have already
reduced our numbers – when are these arbitrary killings going to end?"
Following the killing, Interfax news agency quoted an official source
as saying that Mutaliev had been "destroyed" after putting up armed
resistance to an attempt to arrest him. He was, the report alleged, an
Islamist militant leader who took part in a bloody raid on Ingushetia
in 2004.
Last September, Mutaliev was held in custody for ten days and then
released. During that time, he said, security officials beat him and
tried to make him confess to being a terrorist.
Other officials in Ingushetia have defended the dead man and said they
were concerned at what had happened. An interior ministry source in
Ingushetia’s Malgobek district questioned the official version of
events, saying Mutaliev was not listed as wanted by the Russian or
local authorities, and had no criminal record. He was not a member of
an illegal armed group, nor did he maintain links with armed
militants, the source said.
Ingushetia’s prosecution service is treating the killing as a
crime. It launched a criminal case several hours after Mutaliev was
detained, and later passed the case to the Russian prosecutor for the
Southern Federal District, which covers the whole of the North
Caucasus.
"This is an exceptional event, a murder for no reason," a source in
the Ingush prosecutor’s office told IWPR.
Ingush president Murat Zyazikov gave his law-enforcement agencies a
severe scolding to his law-enforcers, ordering both the chief
prosecutor and interior minister to prevent such incidents from
occurring in future. He said traffic police should record cases of
security officers coming into Ingushetia from elsewhere, and report
them to the interior minister.
Ingushetia used to be much more peaceful than its troubled eastern
neighbour Chechnya, but in recent years it has seen an upsurge in
violence.
Within Ingushetia, there is common agreement that the men who killed
Mutaliev came from outside – almost certainly from North Ossetia, a
neighbour with which the republic has strained relations.
Ingushetia does not have its own detention centre for suspected
militants, so detainees are taken to Vladikavaz in North
Ossetia. Detainees have complained of being beaten and tortured there.
Makka Mutalieva said the men who took her son talked to each other in
Ossetian as well as Russian.
A source in Ingush law enforcement told IWPR that the unit involved in
the incident consisted of a mix of North Ossetian police, policemen
assigned from other parts of Russia, and officers of the FSB security
service.
Spokesmen for the interior ministry and FSB in North Ossetia refused
to comment.
Ruslan Badalov, who heads an Ingushetia-based human rights group
called the Chechen Committee for National Salvation, commented,
"Russia has banned the death penalty, but these extrajudicial
executions show that de facto it hasn’t been abolished, and this is
glaringly obvious in the North Caucasus."
There have been a number of similar incidents in Ingushetia recently.
On February 7, security services killed two men, Ibragim Gardanov and
Magomed Chakhkiev. The two were shot in the centre of Ingushetia’s
main city Nazran in full view of many witnesses, and the case sparked
widespread anger.
The following day, the press service of the local FSB said it had
trapped two men it described as "bandits" suspected of a number of
serious crimes.
Witnesses tell a different story. They say at least ten armed men
swooped on Gardanov’s car, opened all four doors and started firing at
the two men inside without giving a warning. Gardanov was hit by 17
bullets, while Chakhkiev received 24. To make sure the two men were
dead, the attackers shot them in the head.
For several hours after the shooting, FSB agents kept the scene sealed
off. Many witnesses, including Ingush law-enforcement officers, said
the two men in the car could have been captured alive.
Gardanov was well-known locally as a folk healer. His uncle Ahmed,
himself a famous herbalist, said he could have accepted seeing his
nephew arrested, tried and even executed if he were found guilty.
"But they shoot down our young people like partridges," he said. "We
won’t be game-birds for hunters from the Russian security services."
Gardanov’s brother Jamaldin said officials in the prosecutor’s office
had been sympathetic in private, but said there was nothing they could
do. They encouraged him to prove that the dead men were not
terrorists.
"So instead of the special services having to prove they are
terrorists, we ordinary citizens have to prove that our people are not
terrorists after they’ve already been killed," said Jamaldin Gardanov
angrily.
"It’s painful to realise that we won’t find justice in the country of
which we are citizens, and that if we are to punish the criminals who
killed my brother and his companion, we will have to pursue the truth
in international courts.
"They can try to prove that Ibragim was a terrorist, but we know that
he wasn’t."
By Zurab Markhiev in Nazran
Zurab Markhiev is a correspondent with Regnum news agency in
Ingushetia. Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Caucasus Reporting
Service