ABDUCTIONS SHOW NO SIGN OF ABATING

Kavkazky Uzel reported on July 26 that a resident of Grozny’s Zavodsky district had reported to police that five cars with armed people in camouflage uniforms had pulled up to the “Internet-Tsentr” café the previous day and abducted his 28-year-old son, an inspector in the Chechen Interior Ministry’s passport-visa department, along with one of his friends.

Interfax on July 25 reported that a number of people had been abducted in and around Grozny over several days. The news agency quoted a source in the Chechen communications department as saying that Akhmed Ibragimov, a security guard for the federal Transport and Communications Ministry in Chechnya, was attacked by a group of masked people in Grozny’s Staropromyslovsky district, forced into a vehicle and driven away. Unknown armed assailants in camouflage uniforms drove off a police lieutenant and a “passer-by in civilian clothes” in a car belonging to one of the victims. A group of armed men abducted the owner of a garage on Lermontov Street in the capital, while two young men were reported missing in Grozny’s Leninsky district. Kheda Khasanova was reported missing after leaving her home in the Groznensky district village of Alkhan-Yurt, while masked gunmen entered the Shelkovskoi district home of forest establishment director Baysolta Gaziev on July 23, marched him out at gunpoint and shot him on the outskirts of the village of Kharkovskaya. Interfax also reported that a senior Chechen Interior Ministry official was brutally beaten by armed men. The name of the victim was withheld.