Two gay men seized near Moscow this week and sent back to their native Chechnya, a region accused of brutal persecution against homosexuality, face “mortal danger,” a rights group said on Saturday.
The LGBT Network rights group helped the two Chechen men, Salekh Magamadov and Ismail Isayev, flee Muslim-majority Chechnya for Nizhny Novgorod east of Moscow in June last year after they were reportedly tortured by Chechen special police.
The two men were on Thursday detained for unknown reasons in Nizhny Novgorod, and have been sent back to the North Caucasus region, the group said in a statement.
Photo: AP
The men were detained by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and had arrived at a police station in the Chechen town of Gudermes on Saturday, LGBT Network spokesman Tim Bestsvet said.
“They are tired and frightened,” he said.
“All this time they were being pressured to refuse a lawyer,” Bestsvet said, adding that a lawyer with the LGBT Network was in Gudermes trying to gain access to them.
“There have been cases when relatives brought back to Chechnya people that we had evacuated and then these people would die or, we can say, were probably murdered,” Bestsvet said, adding that Magamadov and Isayev face “mortal danger.”
The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs’s Chechnya branch and the FSB were not immediately available for comment.
While Magamadov is older than 18, Bestsvet said that because Isayev is 17 he can only refuse legal representation via his parents.
He added that Isayev’s father was on Saturday brought to the police station and was pressured to refuse to let his son have an attorney.
Magamadov and Isayev were arrested and tortured by Chechen special police in April last year, officially for running an opposition Telegram channel, but “initially because of their sexual orientation,” Bestsvet said.
The two men later recorded a video apology in which they said “they weren’t men,” before the LGBT Network helped them flee, Bestsvet said.
They were also forced under torture to learn passages of the Koran, and Russian and Chechen anthems, he added.
Russia’s volatile republic of Chechnya has been under fire over alleged gay persecution since 2017, when gay men said they were tortured by law enforcement agencies.
In 2019, the LGBT Network reported a second wave of persecution against gay people in the majority Muslim region, including two murders.
Chechen officials regularly dismiss the reports as “made up,” and strongman Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov claims that the region’s population is exclusively heterosexual.
Kadyrov, 36, who has ruled Chechnya with an iron grip since 2007 and oversaw vast redevelopment and Islamisation in the war-torn region, is loathed by rights campaigners who accuse him of ordering kidnappings and extrajudicial killings.
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