A Russian investigative journalist and a lawyer were brutally beaten in the Chechnya region of southern Russia on Tuesday, in an attack that stands out for its brutality in a country accustomed to restrictions. freedom of speech.
Elena Milashina, a journalist of Novaya Gazeta, who unconcealed torture and murder of gay men in Chechnya, in Grozny, Chechen capital, to cover the trial Zarema Musayeva, the mother of exiled opposition activists, according to the newspaper. Milashina and her lawyer Alexander Nemov, who represents Ms. Musayeva, were stopped by a car as they drove through the city, according to the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
The masked men beat them with batons, then took their phones and asked them to unlock them, the newspaper said in a statement. Equipment and documents were also destroyed.
Milashina suffered a traumatic brain injury, broken her fingers and lost consciousness several times, the statement added. The attackers also splashed her with liquid iodine, apparently to prevent her from appearing in public. Mr. Nemov was stabbed in the leg.
A photo published by the newspaper with Milashina’s permission shows the journalist sitting on a hospital stretcher in Grozny with his hands bandaged up to his wrists and his hair mostly shaved.
“It’s a classic kidnapping,” Milashina said from the tape in a short video posted on social media. “It’s just that things like that haven’t happened in a while.”
Another video shows Mrs. Milashina fainted in the hospital corridor in the vicinity of North Ossetia, after being evacuated from Chechnya.
Reporters Without Borders, which advocates for press freedom and tracks violence against journalists, speak on Tuesday that they were “appalled by the barbaric attack” on Ms Milashina. Six journalists for Novaya Gazeta, an independent news agency, have been killed in its three decades of existence. The publication’s editor, Dmitri A. Muratov, received the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. Article ban published in Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 due to wartime censorship laws, but some of its reporters continue to work in exile.
In early 2022, Ms. Musayeva was taken from an apartment building in central Russia, pushed into a black SUV, and taken to Chechnya. Ms. Musayeva’s abduction is widely seen as part of the hunt for her two sons, Abubakar and Ibragim Yangulbayev, prominent government critics who have made Ramzan Kadyrov, the autocratic leader of Chechnya, ie. angry.
Mr. Kadyrov had previously called Milashina “a terrorist accomplice” because she reported on the Yangulbayev family.
The severity of the beating, which authorities did not name a suspect, prompted a rare reaction from Russian officials.
A senior lawmaker in the ruling United Russia party, Andrei Klishas, has called for an investigation and the Kremlin said the government’s human rights inspector had contacted the prosecutor’s office about the attack. .
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov added that President Vladimir V. Putin has been informed about Milashina’s condition. “We are talking about a very serious attack that requires strong measures,” he said at his daily press conference on Tuesday.
Mr. Peskov’s rare admission of this human rights abuse case in Russia points to the complexity of the government’s relationship with Mr. Kadyrov.
Mr. Putin has long relied on the rule of the Chechen leader to maintain his hold on the volatile, predominantly Muslim region. Kadyrov has also become an important Kremlin ally in Ukraine, sending thousands of Chechen paramilitary troops to Russian-occupied territories there.
However, ultra-nationalist factions in Putin’s coalition have hinted that the Kremlin has given security in Chechnya to Kadyrov and his forces, taking it as a sign of bad.
Milana Mazaeva contribution report.
