A special police regiment in the North Caucasus region of Russia has urged President Vladimir Putin to « protect » them from « defamation » by the Moscow-based independent investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta after they reported alleged extrajudicial killings and torture by law enforcement agencies had published in the region.
The regiment’s staff posted a video statement on Instagram on March 17, in which its representatives called Novaya Gazeta, which was co-founded in 1993 by former President Mikhail Gorbachev and is one of the few Russian media outlets criticizing the country’s leadership. « A. Fake magazine, » and the defamatory attacks on his reports. «
The statement also states that the members of the regiment » are ready to carry out any order of the Commander-in-Chief « .
An official said on the video that the regiment « is being forced to take responsibility for one of us to stop the insults » targeting 16,000 police officers in Chechnya.
The statement came two days after Novaya Gazeta published an interview with a former regiment police officer Suleiman Gezmakhmayev, who confirmed the torture and killing of at least 13 Chechen men by police in January 2017.
Previous reports from Novaya Gazeta said the police in Chechnya illegally arrested, tortured and killed 27 men.
According to Novaya Gazeta’s March 15 article, Chechen Ombudsman Nurdi Nukhazhiev and Regional Information and Press Minister Akhmed Dudayev publicly called the report « a lie ».
On March 18, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Chechen police regiment’s testimony to Putin was false, as such complaints would have to be judged by the legal system.
« The President of the Russian Federation is not a judicial organ, cannot make court decisions or accept complaints against the newspaper’s editors, » said Peskov.
Rights groups and critics have accused the Kremlin-backed authoritarian leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and his paramilitary forces of longstanding grave rights violations, including widespread use of kidnapping, torture and extrajudicial killings.
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Ref: https://www.rferl.org
