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Chechen who appealed to the Strasbourg Court dies in Murmansk penal colony

By Ruslan Isayev

CHECHNYA - A Chechen prisoner who appealed to the European Court of Human Rights has died in a penal colony in the Murmansk region of Russia.

According to the colony’s administration, 25-year-old Azamat Uspayev died of injuries resulting from an accidental fall from the second floor of one of the wings of the prison. By a strange coincidence, two other Chechens also suffered a fall from the same wing at the same time. Unlike Azamat, they were fortunate enough to remain alive, though they sustained many injuries.

Human rights activists say that when Azamat’s father went to collect his son’s body, he learned that the condition of the other two Chechens was very critical, and that one of them, a young man named Tamerlan from Chechnya’s Nadterechny district, might not survive.  

Azamat's father was able to find out that on that tragic day the three Chechens had been severely and cruelly beaten. It was not so far possible to ascertain whether this had been done by prisoners or by the prison authorities.

Azamat Uspayev is the son of the well-known Chechen human rights defender Madina Elmurzayeva, who initiated the opening in Chechnya of a branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In 1995 she was killed in Grozny when she tried to move the body of a dead civilian. The body had been booby-trapped with a mine. Azamat was 13 years old at the time.

In 2003 Azamat was detained by the ill-famed ORB-2 police unit. After a short investigation and trial, the court sentenced him to 17 years' imprisonment and sent him to the Murmansk penal colony. Uspayev made several attempts to have his case brought to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. His last appeal to the court was in June, and just a month later he was killed.

(D,T)

  RELATED ARTICLES:
 · Chechen inmates in Mordovian penal colony complain of abuses
 · History of Madina Elmurzayeva and her family (Hro.org, 19.5.2004)