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The human rights media project 1ADAT published an investigation about a secret prison of the Rosgvardia's Akhmat SOBR, where, according to its sources, kidnapped Chechnya residents are being held and tortured. In the video published by 1ADAT, Ibrahim Yangulbayev, son of retired federal judge Saidi Yangulbayev and Zarema Musayeva abducted by Chechen security forces, describes the layout of the building which he himself visited in 2015.
The video shows for the first time the layout of the secret prison. It is located in a military barracks, with the entrance through a garage, where, according to Yangulbayev, prisoners are tortured, interrogated and killed. Beyond the garage, there is an office which separates the operatives' room from the prison cells. There are seven cells, two punishment cells, and a bathroom used by the prison staff. Prisoners are sometimes held in the prison for years without being allowed to contact their families. Also, according to Yangulbayev, there were cases when people became sick and «literally rotted».
«When I was detained, operative Zelimkhan Makhmutkhazhiyev took away my smartphone because his was broken. He took some videos and pictures with it from the SOBR office. The footage shows a man who was held with us - he was a person close to [Ramzan] Kadyrov, who did something wrong. Then the operative deleted the videos, but they had been saved in my cloud drive and in my phone memory,» Yangulbayev said in an interview with Kavkaz.Realii.
Makhmutkhazhiyev is the younger brother of Imam-Ali Makhmutkhazhiyev, a member of the Chechen parliament from the United Russia party and the former head of the Shatoi district police department in Chechnya.
Saidi Yangulbayev's son Ibrahim, known for his harsh criticism of the Chechen authorities, said in an interview with the Dozhd TV channel that he, along with his father and brother, had been kidnapped and tortured at Ramzan Kadyrov's residence in 2015, with Kadyrov personally participating in the torture. Later, according to Ibrahim, his brother and father were released, but he himself was taken to the Terek SOBR (now Akhmat SOBR) compound, where the humiliation continued, after which he was locked in the basement for six months.
On January 20, Chechen law enforcers broke into his parents' apartment in Nizhniy Novgorod. They could not kidnap Yangulbaev Sr. because he had immunity as a judge, but they took his wife, Zarema Musaeva. The reason given for the kidnapping was that she had been allegedly a witness in a fraud case in Grozny, where the kidnappers planned to take her.
On January 22 it was reported that Saidi Yangulbaev had left Russia with his daughter out of fear for his life. On January 31 a criminal case was opened against the kidnapped Musaeva for «the use of violence against a police officer». On the same day a criminal case was opened against her son Ibrahim on charges of public calls for terrorist activity. On March 3, he was added to the list of terrorists and extremists.