On 7 February 2010 around 7 p.m. in Shaly, Chechnya, the police detained three human rights defenders: Dmitry Yegoshin (Regional NGO “Man and Law”, Yoshkar-Ola), Roman Veretennikov (NGO “Mothers in support of the detainees, indictees and convicts”, Krasnodar), Vladislav Sadykov (Bashkirian represenatation of INGO “Committee against Torture”). The detention was organized by Magomed Daudov and performed under his personal supervision. Mr. Daudov is the head of the Shaly District Department of Internal Affairs where the human rights defenders were taken after the detention.
The three detainees are lawyers of the Joint Mobile Group (JMG) of Russian human rights defenders that has been working in Chechnya since November 2009 investigating into the allegations of torture, abduction and notorious murders in that Russian region.
As we have learnt, the human rights defenders were detained while meeting with an unknown Chechnya citizen who had promised to give valuable information about one of the abducted citizens of the Shaly district. However, during the meeting Roman Veretennikov and Vladislav Sadykov were detained and taken to the office of the Shaly District Department of Internal Affairs head. An hour and a half later the third JMG member, Dmitry Yegoshin, was detained by the traffic police. It is suspected that the meeting had been arranged by officers of the Shaly district Department of Internal Affairs.
Oleg Khabibrakhmanov, worker of the Committee against Torture, managed to talk to someone introducing himself as Magomed Daudov (in Chechnya known as the Lord) on the phone and found out that the human rights defenders had been really taken to the Shaly district Department of Internal Affair and there were some investigative actions performed with their participation. According to Mr. Daudov, they are not detained officially, but they will stay in the Department of Internal Affairs till the morning. He claims that the Federal Security Service and the Republican Prosecutor’s Office have been notified about the JMG lawyers’ detention.