Global Courant
Armed masked men attacked and seriously injured a prominent Russian journalist and a lawyer in Russia’s Chechnya region on Tuesday morning after forcing their car to stop, the journalist, her employer and human rights organizations said.
Yelena Milashina, a well-known journalist for Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was on her way to the Chechen capital Grozny from the local airport with Alexander Nemov, a lawyer, when they were attacked.
Milashina and Nemov, who planned to attend a court hearing in the case of a woman they believe was wrongly prosecuted for political reasons, have been transferred to a hospital in a neighboring region and are expected to be flown to Moscow for further treatment .
“It was a classic kidnapping… They pinned (our driver), threw him out of his car, got in, bent our heads down, tied my hands, knelt me down and put a gun to my head,” Milashina told Mansur Soltayev, a Chechen human rights official, as she was hospitalized in Grozny before being transferred.
Memorial, a rights organization banned in Russia, said Milashina and Nemov had been “brutally kicked, including in the face, threatened with death, held a gun to their heads and had their equipment taken and destroyed”.
“As they were beaten, they were told, ‘You have been warned. Go away and don’t write anything,” Memorial said in a statement to Telegram.
A photo of Milashina, whose newspaper was revoked in Russia last year, showed her sitting on a hospital bed with her face covered in green dye thrown on her by her attackers, her head shaved bald by her attackers and bandage on her left hand. arm and right hand amid reports that several of her fingers had been broken.
The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin had been notified of what it called “a very serious attack,” which it said should be investigated and followed by “energetic measures.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a close ally of Putin, wrote on Telegram: “We will sort it out. I have instructed the relevant services to make every effort to identify the attackers.”
But Soltayev, the Chechen rights official, was quoted by the RIA news agency as calling the attack “a provocation” against Chechen authorities.
Some Russian lawmakers and officials in Moscow condemned the attack and demanded an investigation. Russian human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said those responsible must be punished.
Mokhmad Akhmadov, a senator from Chechnya, was quoted by RIA as believing that Kadyrov would get to the bottom of the matter and that he did not think the attack had been approved at an official level.
Milashina has spent years investigating alleged human rights violations in Chechnya, including what she said was the mass arrest and torture of gay men in the region, and had previously received many threats, including with her life.
Her employer evacuated her from Russia last year after Kadyrov described her as a terrorist in a social media post and was attacked in Chechnya in 2020.
Kadyrov denies any rights violations and says such allegations were fabricated by ill-wishers seeking to discredit Chechnya and its authorities.
Rights group “Team Against Torture” said Nemov, the lawyer accompanying her, was stabbed in the leg and quoted him as saying that the masked assailants had used three cars to block the vehicle in which he and Milashina had been traveling.
Milashina and Nemov, both of whom allegedly suffered numerous fractures in the attack, were in Chechnya to report on the sentencing of Zarema Musayeva, a Chechen woman charged with assaulting a police officer and fraud – allegations she denied – in a case that critics see as revenge against her sons and husband who were deemed unfaithful by Kadyrov and fled the country.
A Chechen court found Musayeva guilty on Tuesday and sentenced him to five and a half years in a penal colony.
A Russian court last year stripped Novaya Gazeta, led by Nobel Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, of its media license, a move Muratov says was politically motivated.
