Men believed to be gay are being abducted, tortured or even killed in Chechnya as part of a coordinated campaign with impunity.
On 1 April, the Russian independent daily newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported that hundreds of men believed to be gay have been abducted in recent days, as part of a coordinated campaign. The men were reportedly tortured and otherwise ill-treated, and forced to disclose other LGBTI individuals known to them. Novaya Gazeta claimed to have verified information about at least three men who had been killed by their captors, but its sources claim that there have been many more killings.
There are reports that some of the abducted men have since been returned to their families, possibly because their sexual orientation was not confirmed by their captors. However, they remain in grave danger because of local homophobic intolerance. Members of the NGO Russian LGBTI network have confirmed this information, and have created a hotline offering help to those who may be looking for safety outside the region. However, there are also anonymous warnings online that some of the offers of help made over the internet may be used by the perpetrators of these crimes to track down further LGBTI individuals. Reactions from Chechen officials to this information has varied from denial (for instance, by Alvi Karimov, the Press Secretary of the Head of the Republic), to dismissing it as joke, to further thinly veiled threats. On 3 April the press secretary of the Russian Presidential Administration, Dimitry Peskov, announced that the Ministry of Interior were “checking information about the alleged persecution of men of non-traditional orientation”.
