06 May 2005, 17:47
Women protest against abuse
Several dozen women looking for their missing relatives held a picket before the building of the Committee on the Ensuring of the Constitutional Rights of Citizens of the Chechen Republic.
Women from various districts of Chechnya held photos of their relatives abducted or brought away at various times in the process of various "special activities" by officers of various law enforcement and security agencies. The picketers demanded that the authorities should establish the whereabouts of the missing or find their bodies.
"We have come here more than once," Satsita, a 55-year-old resident of Chechnya's Grozny district, told Caucasian Knot. "A common grief joins us: the disappearance without trace of our sons, husbands and brothers taken away by the military at various times."
"In many cases, officials at military commandant's offices, prosecutor's offices or district police divisions refuse to accept our statements of abductions. They recommend we should apply to another agency or invent various pretexts. We want to know where our relatives are, who and for what detained them and what they are charged with. If they are no longer alive, let them return their bodies for us to be able to bury them in the due manner," she says.
Meanwhile, new information is received about abductions in Chechnya. Four local residents, including two women, have been abducted in the past 48 hours, a source at Chechnya's law enforcement agencies told Caucasian Knot. Abductions were registered in Grozny and in the Naurskaia district in the north of Chechnya.
According to the source, one woman, presumably resident in the Achkhoi-Martan district, was abducted in Grozny's Zavodskoi district on 5 May by people in masks and camouflage uniforms, armed with automatic weapons.
A group of people in military uniforms broke into a room in a Grozny temporary accommodation point and brought away a young man living there on the night of 5 May.
A group of unidentified persons in military uniforms detained in the street a resident of Grozny's Staropromyslovskii district and abducted her in the evening on 4 May. In the morning on the same day, people in camouflage uniforms abducted a local resident from Kalinovskaia, Naurskaia district.
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Author: Sultan Abubakarov, CK correspondent
