Leaked Chechnya government documents confirm police role in 2017 extrajudicial killings: report News
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Leaked Chechnya government documents confirm police role in 2017 extrajudicial killings: report

Independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta released exclusive documentation leaked from a government source Monday confirming that 27 men who went missing and were presumed dead in 2017 were in fact detained by Chechnyan local police, undermining the Chechnyan authorities’ official denial of their involvement in the disappearances.

The documentation comes in the form of internal police charts that list mugshots and identities of the individuals, with many photos indicating the marks of physical violence inflicted while in custody. It is believed that these individuals were arrested during police crackdowns on the LGBT community. Russian prosecutors have claimed such crackdowns were essential to combat ISIS-linked terror in Chechnya, and have released videos—now believed to be doctored—showing the detained men pledging themselves to ISIS.

Chechnya, a semi-autonomous republic of Russia, has been criticized for its tacit allowance of violence campaigns against LGBT individuals, which a 2017 report from Human Rights Watch called “brutal.” Recent years have seen large-scale purges of men presumed to be gay, with dozens rounded up and subjected to torture in police detention. Amid international pushback, the Russian government controversially claimed during a UN Human Rights Council meeting in 2018 that “it was not possible to find representatives of the LGBT community in Chechnya.”

The leaked documentation represents some of the strongest evidence to date showing that the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs was directly linked to these disappearances and subsequent extrajudicial executions, emphasizing the role the government continues to play in policing the LGBT community in the republic. This comes weeks after two Chechnyan LGBT activists were detained in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod before being sent back to Chechnya.

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