Chechen police hold mother for more than two days after ex-husband accuses her of abducting daughter, rights group says
A mother of two has gone silent in Chechnya after her ex-husband accused her of abducting their daughter, the human rights group Marem reported on April 16.
Belkisa Mintsayeva was blackmailed into flying to the republic and has been held incommunicado for more than two days at the Interior Ministry’s department in the Nadterechny District, even though police have no legal grounds to detain her, human rights activists said.
Marem published an appeal Mintsayeva had recorded several days earlier, addressed to Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Russian federal investigating authority. In it, she says she lives in Novosibirsk and that two years ago her ex-husband, Sulim Dilmukhanov, abducted their daughters while the girls were on vacation in Chechnya with their grandmother.
Mintsayeva filed a petition in Novosibirsk to determine where the children would live. A court allowed her to take back the older daughter, now 14, but left the younger one, who was not yet 9 at the time, with the father. The legal proceedings continued.
On April 6, Mintsayeva traveled to Chechnya to see her younger daughter, who told her she wanted to return to her mother and sister in Novosibirsk. Mintsayeva took the girl and flew back. Upon arriving in Novosibirsk, she learned that her ex-husband had filed an abduction complaint against her and against an acquaintance who had been with her when she picked up the child. Her acquaintance had already been detained, Mintsayeva said, and she and her relatives had been receiving threatening calls from her ex-husband. After that, Mintsayeva was blackmailed into coming to Chechnya “for a conversation,” with her brother among those detained in the process, Marem reported. The whereabouts of her daughters are currently unknown.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].
To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.