20:28, 9 March 2016

Rights defenders report about four victims of attack in Chechnya

The employees on the Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) Ivan Zhiltsov and Ekaterina Vanslova, and European journalists Oistan Vindstad and Maria Persson Löfgren suffered in an attack on a minibus of the Free Mobile Group (FMG) in Chechnya, said Dmitry Utukin, a lawyer of the CPT.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that today a group of rights defenders of the JMG, accompanied by journalists, was attacked in Chechnya. The attackers set the van of the JMG on fire and beat up the people inside it, Yegor Skovoroda, a correspondent of the "Mediazona", has reported.

Dmitry Utukin has written on the Twitter that the van was blocked by several cars. According to his story, people went out of the cars and started smashing the windows of the van, screaming: "Come out, terrorists!" The "journalists from Norway and Sweden were severely hurt."

According to other sources, the attackers did not touch the women, Ivan Davydov, a journalist of The New Times, wrote on the Facebook.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.