Human rights activists confirm murder by Chechen security forces of Telegram channel moderator abducted in September 2020

Salman Tepsurkaev, the moderator of a Telegram channel that monitors human rights abuses in Chechnya, was murdered by local security forces almost two years ago. In an interview published on Tuesday, August 23, lawyer and activist Olga Sadovskaya confirmed what many already suspected: Tepsurkaev was killed a few days after he was abducted in Gelendzhik and transported to Chechnya, where Chechen officials took his clothes and forced him to record a video where he called his work online “obscene” before torturing himself on camera (by trying to sit on a glass bottle).

After the release of Sadovskaya’s interview, Tepsurkaev’s former Telegram channel colleagues at 1ADAT revealed that they received information about his murder long ago, hoping desperately that there’d been some mistake and he was still alive. According to 1ADAT’s sources, Chechen security officials killed Tepsurkaev on September 15, 2020, at a military training center in the hometown of Adam Delimkhanov (a top Chechen politician and a cousin of Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov).

More recently, in January 2022, Chechen officials traveled to Nizhny Novgorod and abducted the diabetic mother of 1ADAT founder Ibrahim Yangulbayev on dubious charges of assaulting a police officer. More than eight months later, she remains in pretrial detention in Grozny.