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TITLE: Russian Group Accuses Army Over Chechnya Killings |
AUTHOR: |
PUB: Reuters |
DATE: March 7, 2001 |
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MOSCOW, -- (Reuters) A leading Russian rights group produced videotape on Tuesday showing bound and mutilated bodies from a Chechnya mass grave, and said the film proved the army had murdered civilians and executed suspects without trial. Russia's Chechnya spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky and other officials were not available for comment on the allegations, which surrounded the discovery last month of dozens of bodies on the outskirts of the Chechen regional capital Grozny. Russia's prosecutor for Chechnya has already said the bodies were mostly of rebels killed in action in 18 months of fighting. But Oleg Orlov, president of the Memorial rights group, said he had seen, and his group had documented on tape, clear evidence that some of the dead had been executed. "I know that there were people there who had not fought, who had not taken any weapons into their hands," he told Reuters. "This is without a doubt the remains of a crime committed by the federal (Russian) forces." Orlov said he had seen 23 bodies after they had been moved from a mass grave to a collection point for relatives. He said a colleague had later seen 50 bodies there. Memorial's video, made available to Reuters, showed dozens of corpses lined up at the collection site. Most were of men, many in civilian clothes, many with hands and feet bound with rope in elaborate knots. Several skulls were shown with small bullet holes in the center of the forehead. Memorial is a respected organization which has documented the excesses of the Stalin era since its foundation in the mid-1980s under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy of openness. The authorities have put the number of corpses at 48, but Orlov said it was more likely to be 54 or 55. In the video, Chechen civilians were shown covering their faces from the stench and picking through the corpses, looking for relatives. More bodies are unloaded from a truck by men in gas masks. Orlov said four of the bodies were women. He said some had been blindfolded. Others had been mutilated, apparently by killers collecting souvenirs. "I personally saw two people with their ears cut off," Orlov said. Putin Dismisses Charges Of Brutality Russia has many times denied that its forces committed systematic rights abuses during a military campaign from late 1999 to the first half of 2000. Orlov said the victims had been dead for less than a year, which meant they were killed when the area was under Russian control. He said relatives had already taken away seven bodies and identified them as corpses of people who had disappeared after being arrested by Russian security forces. President Vladimir Putin, speaking in a live Internet interview on Tuesday with the British Broadcasting Corporation and two Russian web sites, dismissed suggestions that Russian forces acted brutally in Chechnya. "These questions reflect how a significant number of people in the West do not understand what is happening in the Caucasus, especially in Chechnya," Putin said in response to a Danish woman's comment that Russia used "cruel methods" in Chechnya. He also parried the BBC journalist's assertion that Russia's campaign had failed to win over Chechen public opinion. The reporter said she had been to Chechnya and found locals were hostile to Moscow and angry at the military intervention. "Many people look at it negatively, many positively. We believe the Russian army's actions are aimed at liberating the Chechen people from the terrorists who had seized power there," Putin said. END |