Russian's human rights commissioner says Chechen police are ‘protecting’ the relatives of more than a dozen disappeared persons

Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova says local Chechen law enforcement have placed in protective custody the relatives of more than a dozen individuals who disappeared this January.

Moskalkova says she met no one on a recent trip to Chechnya who claimed to have received any threats, though she says she’s heard reports “from other sources” about such dangers.

“I filed an official statement with the Chechen Interior Ministry about the inadmissibility of such pressure on people, and I received information that these people were placed under the protection of law enforcement agencies,” Moskalkova told the news agency TASS.

This summer, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that as many as 27 people may have been detained and executed in January 2017 outside Grozny, following raids against individuals suspected of being involved in a series of attacks in December 2016 against police officers. Chechen officials denied the charges.

In late July, the BBC reported that relatives of the missing persons were forced to write statements claiming that their loved ones had left for Syria or simply moved away and never come home.

After Novaya Gazeta’s reporting, Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova visited Chechnya. She later said that Chechen police had opened criminal investigations into the disappearances of 18 people. Independent journalists wrote that the relatives of these missing persons were forbidden from sharing their grievances with Moskalkova. According to the human rights organization Memorial, Moskalkova even met with two men pretending to be two of the missing persons. In fact, they were the victims’ brothers.