Yesterday unidentified persons attacked and damaged the office of the Joint Mobile Group of human rights defenders working under the auspices of interregional non-governmental organization «The Committee Against Torture». For about one and a half hours young men in masks armed with sledgehammers, baseball bats and grinders were crushing our office. We officially state that during this time none of the law-enforcement agencies representatives arrived at the scene, despite the reports of our colleagues via telephones of police dispatch center of the Ministry of the Interior of Grozny and the Regional Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Grozny, and did nothing to stop the criminal actions.
We also state that the information concerning the incident which is distributed by the Chechen media, is false. None of our lawyers came up to the crowd and shouted anything like it is passed on in the regional media and relayed by some public figures (allegedly, there were shouts from our side that the Committee Against Torture does not defend murderers).
Our organization defends the rights of human being. Any human being. For fifteen years we have followed this obvious rule and have no intention to turn back. As to the situation around the killing of Dadayev by Stavropol police officers we would like to emphasize that none of his relatives applied to us for support. It does not matter to us whether the person whose rights are violated is guilty or not, good or bad… If anyone applies to our organization it means that we start working despite everything.
We are certain that for this rally people had to be gathered and they did not realize what they were doing there, the bashing was conducted not by the rally participants and for sure was not initiated by Dadayev’s relatives.
As a result the office of our organization and apartment of our colleagues are crushed in the center of “the safest city” with the complete connivance of the official authorities.
We already sent the crime reports to the Ministry of the Interior and the Investigative Committee.
We state that the work of the Joint Mobile Group will not be stopped.