Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov says there are no gay people in Chechnya
Credit: Yelena Afonina/TASS via Getty Images
Two gay men seized near Moscow last week and sent back to their native Chechnya, a region accused of brutal persecution against homosexuality, face "mortal danger", a rights group says.
The LGBT Network rights group helped the two Chechen men flee the region for Nizhny Novgorod, east of Moscow, in June last year, after they were reportedly tortured by Chechen special police.
The two men, aged 18 and 17, were detained for unknown reasons in Nizhny Novgorod on Thursday and have been sent back to the North Caucasus region, the group said in a statement.
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.
Chechen officials regularly dismiss the reports as "made up" and strongman chief Ramzan Kadyrov claims the region’s population is exclusively heterosexual.
LGBT Network spokesman Tim Bestsvet said the two men were detained by the FSB domestic intelligence agency and had arrived at a police station in Chechen town of Gudermes on Saturday.
"They are tired and frightened," he told AFP on Saturday. "All this time they were being pressured to refuse a lawyer," Mr Bestsvet said, adding that a lawyer with the LGBT Network was in Gudermes trying to get access to the men.
"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," Mr Bestsvet said.
The interior ministry’s Chechnya branch and the Federal Security Service have not commented.
The men were arrested and tortured by Chechen special police in April 2020, officially for running an opposition Telegram channel, but really because of their sexual orientation, said Mr Bestsvet.
They later recorded a video apology in which they said "they weren’t men," before the LGBT Network helped them flee, Mr Bestsvet added.
Свежие комментарии