As Kadyrov consolidated power, political opponents and critics were either forced out of the region or died.
Alu Alkhanov, an interim president who preceded Kadyrov, was compelled to leave Chechnya in 2007.
In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist for the Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta covering Chechnya, was shot in the entryway of her Moscow apartment building.
Two brothers from a rival, Moscow-backed Chechen family were killed, one in his car in Moscow last year and the other in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, in April.
In January, a former Chechen government insider who had publicly accused Kadyrov of torture, was shot to death in Vienna.
Kadyrov has denied any role in these killings.
“All enemies of Kadyrov are mysteriously disappearing,” Sokiryanskaya said.
Estemirova’s death closed off a source of detailed criticism of Kadyrov for journalists and human rights groups. On Saturday, Aleksandr Cherkasov, a director of Memorial, said the group’s Grozny office would be temporarily closed because “what we have been doing involves mortal danger,” the Interfax news agency reported.
Masayev, whose brother disappeared last August, agreed to speak only about the grief his brother’s disappearance had caused the family. Memorial had documented the particulars of the case.
The vanished brother, Mukhamadsalakh Masayev, lived in Moscow through Chechnya’s two wars in the 1990s. A religious Muslim, he returned to Chechnya in 2006 hoping to work as an imam, but was detained and held for four months in a parked bus on a Chechen military base. After his release, he granted an interview to Novaya Gazeta directly implicating Kadyrov in his abuse.
“One day, they took us out to the woods and cocked their assault rifles,” as if threatening them with execution, Masayev said in the interview. “Laughing, they brought us back. One day, a man with the nickname Jihad, the commander of some sort of battalion, beat me and yelled debasing words. Another day, the guards took us at night to a meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov put a foot forward, as if for us to lick it and ask for forgiveness.”
He said he was released after being invited to drink tea with Kadyrov.
After the publication, Mukhamadsalakh Masayev returned to Chechnya to attend a funeral against the advice of his older brother.
He disappeared soon after he arrived in Chechnya. His seven children live in Moscow with relatives.
“The children ask me, ‘When will Papa come home?”’ Oleg Masayev said of his meetings with his nieces and nephews now. “And I don’t know what to say. I say, ‘He is traveling on the path of God.’”
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