Audio record with girl brought to Chechnya provokes new questions

A Moscow female resident who complained to human rights defenders about being forced to forcibly marry in Chechnya recorded an audio appeal with a refutation of the information. The girl was forced to make such a record, believes Ekaterina Vinokurova, a member of the Human Rights Council.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on July 13, Dariya Serenko, an activist of the "Kitezh" crisis centre, reported about a 20-year-old Moscow resident whom her parents took to Chechnya against her will. According to the activist, the girl was dating a Russian boyfriend, and her parents wanted to force their daughter to marry a fellow countryman.

In the evening on July 15, the audio record with the girl's voice was disseminated by the "Mash" Telegram channel. The girl states that she is "all right," she just had "no mobile phone."

"No one, nothing ... in brief, no one took me forcibly anywhere. I'm fine, and everything is ok," says the girl on the audio record.

Further on the voice of her sister is heard on the record. "Every summer we go to Chechnya to see our grandmother. No one has ever said a word about forced marriage. Why did they inflate it at all?" the girl's sister says.

Ekaterina Vinokurova, a member of the Human Rights Council under the President of Russia, did not believe in the sincerity of the girl's statement on the record. "In response to our posts about the disappearance of [the name of the girl], they give us the audio record with the frightened girl and her sister," Ekaterina Vinokurova wrote in her Telegram channel.

According to her, the girl stays in the Urus-Martan District, and on July 15, some officials came to visit her. Till present, the "Caucasian Knot" does not yet have any confirmation of the information.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on July 16, 2019 at 02:18 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.