Complaint of 75 Chechen victims of 1999 bombing sent to ECtHR

The complaint, prepared by the Committee Against Torture, was forwarded to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg on behalf of 75 applicants from Chechnya. They include both close relatives of the casualties and the persons who were seriously injured as a result of the missile attack and bombing of the village of Elistanzhi, Vedeno District of the Chechen Republic, by Russian Air Forces on October 7, 1999.

The Committee Against Torture reports, in its statement that has arrived at the "Caucasian Knot", that this complaint with 75 applicants is the record one, ever submitted from Chechnya by the number of victims in one case.

The bombing on October 7, 1999, destroyed the Elistanzhi rural school and plenty of private households. The missile-and-bomb strike led to a large number of civilian casualties among the villagers. The total number of victims of the bombing was at least 95 persons - 35 casualties and 60 wounded.

The list of casualties includes 10 children aged from infants to 14 years of age, and 7 persons aged 61 and older. Among those wounded, as of the time of the tragedy, 23 persons were children aged from infants to 14.

The victims and witnesses of the bombing indicate in their evidences that at the moment of the attack the village of Elistanzhi had no military objects or facilities that could have been taken for military ones; and during the attack on the village the weather was clear, and the aircrafts were clearly visible from the ground.

The version that the attack was carried out by Russian warplanes was the only one considered by investigatory bodies of the Russian Federation. They never denied the involvement of Russia's Air Forces in bombing Elistanzhi on October 7, 1999, the Committee Against Torture reports.

Human rights activists point out that the inquiry history of this criminal case is a chain of suspensions and resumptions of the investigation with a vain attempt to convey the inquiry into the hands of the system of military justice. To date, the criminal investigation remains unfinished. A number of residents were nominated as victims by the inquiry; evidences were taken from victims and witnesses about the circumstances of the bombing; medical examinations were carried out; however, those suspected of committing a crime were not established; charges of causing deaths and injuries to civilian residents of the village were not presented to anyone; and nobody was brought to criminal liability.