Normal0Moscow/Agency Caucasus – The assassination of Magomed Yevloyev, a prominent opponent of the Kremlin-allied administration of Ingushetia, a federal subject of Russia that borders with Chechnya, when he was taken into police custody in Magas, capital of Ingushetia, immediately after his disembarkation on Sunday is an insult at and audacious intimidation of human rights activists, said Aslambek Apayev, an expert on the North Caucasus at the Moscow Helsinki group.
“This is a political murder intended to challenge audaciously as well as callously all of the human rights organizations in Russia. It is meant to intimidate the opponents like Magomed Yevloyev, a well-known opposition leader whose dead body was thrown away in central city after he was kidnapped to an unknown place in broad daylight before the eyes of hundreds of eyewitnesses,” said Apayev.
“The execution without due process was carried out as ordered from above,” said Apayev. “The investigation must be carried out by independent experts. Or else, the real murderers as well as perpetuators will never be taken to court, just as the murderers of Galina Vasilyevna Starovoitova (d. 1998), Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin (d. 2003) and Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya (d. 2006) still remain free.”
Yuri Petrovich Shchekochikhin was poisoned in 2003 while he was investigating the Russian apartment bombings, a series of explosions orchestrated by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) that hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing nearly 300 people and spreading a wave of fear across the country. They were quickly blamed by the Russian government on Chechen separatists and were used as a pretext for the military invasion of the Chechnya, which started on September 30 and escalated the Second Chechen War. Galina Vasilyevna Starovoitova, a liberal politician known for her work about the Caucasian peoples, was shot to death in her apartment building in Moscow in 1998. Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, was a Russian journalist who made it her job to write the truth about Chechnya, was also shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building in 2006.
Apayev called for the international community to take urgent action to stop the situation from going worse in Ingushetia, Dagestan, Chechnya and other North Caucasian regions. “Political murders, intimidations, abolishment of non-governmental organizations and many other infringements will grow to be what is called the 1937 exile during Stalin’s regime. The time has come for the world to realize that there is now a new authoritarian regime installed in Russia.”
KU/ÖZ/FT
