Igor Kalyapin is the founder of the Committee Against Torture organization (in 2015 it was included in the register of non-profit organizations-foreign agents, began working under the name Committee for the Prevention of Torture, which was then also included in the register of foreign agents). In 2016, he was attacked in Grozny: unknown persons attacked him near the hotel and threw eggs at him. Kalyapin came to the capital of Chechnya because of the attack on the organization’s employees and journalists near the Chechen-Ingush border.
Elena Milashina is the author of publications on Chechnya in Novaya Gazeta, including articles on extrajudicial executions in the republic. After the material was released in March 2021, the publication’s employees reported that a chemical was sprayed near the building where the editorial office is located. Kadyrov called the journalists of Novaya Gazeta “agents of well-known Western services unbelted from impunity.” The Chechen authorities accused the publication of publishing fakes.
Saydi Yangulbaev is the father of human rights activist Ibragim Yangulbaev, whom the Chechen authorities suspect of running the opposition Telegram channel 1ADAT. In December last year, he was recognized as an extremist in the republic. Ibragim Yangulbaev spent about a year and a half in a pre-trial detention center on a case of extremism, complained to the ECHR about beatings and torture in the Grozny police. Yangulbaev Sr. also has a son, Abubakar, who worked in the “Committee against Torture” (the legal entities of the organization were recognized as foreign agents, now it works without registration) and a daughter, Aliya, they left Russia in January. According to Abubakar Yangulbaev, there is no contact with his relatives who remained in Grozny.
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The son of an ex-judge from Chechnya said that his relatives do not get in touch
In his Telegram, Kadyrov published several entries, which he calls the correspondence of the Yangulbaev brothers. He also referred to an audio recording in the Alternative 95 Telegram channel, on which, according to the head of Chechnya, “you can listen to what the Yangulbaev brothers want to do with the Chechens.” Recorded in Chechen. According to Alternative 95, Ibragim Yangulbaev “declares that he is going to kill all supporters of the Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov, all civil servants, all law enforcement officers, as well as their wives, mothers and other family members.”
Who owns this Telegram channel, Kadyrov did not specify. In January, reposts from it did ChGTRK “Grozny”.
On January 20, the Committee Against Torture reported that armed men in civilian clothes and masks broke into an apartment in Nizhny Novgorod where Saydi Yangulbaev lived with his wife Zarema Musayeva. They presented the decision of the Chechen investigation to forcibly bring them in for interrogation, after which they forcibly took Musaeva, who suffers from diabetes, to Grozny without taking the necessary medicines. The former judge recorded a video message to the press secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov, in which he announced the kidnapping of his wife.
Chechen authorities claim that “there was no kidnapping” and Musayeva is a witness in the fraud case. According to Minister Akhmed Dudayev, she was sent a summons for interrogation several times. Now, he says, Musayeva is in the special detention center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for insulting a security official. Kadyrov had previously accused the woman of “attacking a police officer and almost depriving him of an eye.”