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On January 7, the criminal investigators decided to arrest Investigator Zhuravlyov of the October Office, having established that he had tortured Zelimkhan. However, the Head of the Department, Colonel Valeriy Kondakov, hastily issued an order backdated to January 5, sending him home to Nizhnevartovsk. According to witnesses, Kondakov himself was implicated in what befell Zelimkhan, and had no wish for anyone to start talking to the Prosecutor’s Office. On January 18, the trick was repeated. An attempt to detain Lapin, “The Cadet,” was foiled when Kondakov hurriedly had him sent home; and on February 7, the entire Khanty-Mansiysk contingent, celebrating the end of their 90-day tour of duty – the usual period for which Russian troops are sent to Chechnya – returned to Nizhnevartovsk.

There they became virtually inaccessible, either for questioning or for arrest, as if Nizhnevartovsk were not a Siberian city with a quarter of a million inhabitants but a far-off place in Latin America where war criminals could hide. On March 12, for example, the Grozny Prosecutor’s Office sent two of its officers to Nizhnevartovsk to detain The Cadet and return him under guard to Chechnya, where the alleged crime had been committed. On April 2 they returned with only a signed undertaking from him not to leave Nizhnevartovsk. On April 20 the investigation was informed that the Nizhnevartovsk Municipal Court had released him even from this undertaking. They also learned of statements by the Deputy Prosecutor of Nizhnevartovsk to the effect that he would not be handing over anybody from his city to face charges relating to the disappearance of a Chechen and that the case should be closed. Neither did he. The case faced stalemate. For the past eight months the collective might of Russia’s law enforcement agencies has proved insufficient to resolve the matter.

Murdalov’s crime, it transpired, had been only to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. On January 2, the militiamen had urgently needed a Chechen informer to falsely accuse a suspect so they could report a success to their superiors. The Khanty-Mansiysk detachment seized the first person they came across and tried to force him to collaborate, using their usual methods. It was as simple as that.

“Why?” That is the only question his mother Rukiyat wants answered, having lost her only son. Zelimkhan’s father, Astemir, has shed more than 20 kilograms in weight and admits he will never be able to forgive this crime.

Abdulkasim Zaurbekov from Novosadovaya Street in Grozny had just started work at the October District Office as a temporary crane operator. At 9:00 a.m. on October 17 last year he went into the building to collect his wages, signed a receipt for 2,400 roubles, and was never seen again. His 18-year-old son, Aindi, waited for his father at the security checkpoint until evening, but he never emerged from the office and to this day there has been no sign of him.

On August 27 last year, Mahomed Umarov was abducted at dawn from his home on Klyuchevaya Street in Staropromyslovsky District, Grozny, by men in combat fatigues. By 9:00 a.m. his parents, Ruslan and Leila, were able to identify several of his abductors as working in the District Commandant’s Office. They succeeded in having a criminal case opened by the Prosecutor’s Office, but at this point that particular contingent of soldiers returned home from Chechnya and there the matter ended.

Even the risk-averse Eva Khubalkova, an official working in the Council of Europe Mission in Znamenskoye, eventually provided a statistic showing that, of applications relating to the “disappeared” sent by the office of Vladimir Kalamanov, the President’s Special Representative, to the Prosecutor’s Office and other law enforcement agencies of Chechnya, 55 per cent receive no reply at all. For the 45 per cent that do, the overwhelming majority of responses are callous and casually dismissive. A blatant refusal by the law enforcement agencies to take action in abduction cases involving