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By Root 1141 0

Chechen Prosecutor’s Office made no attempt to excavate the pit, on the grounds that the rains had arrived. As a rule, it is the relatives of the disappeared who voluntarily carry out such exhumations in Chechnya. Here that was impossible because the grave was in a high security zone. As a result, the pit, whose contents might have become major evidence of the crimes committed by the Khanties, was handed over into the safe keeping of the Khanties themselves. What do you think? Have they had enough time by now to destroy the material evidence, namely the bones of their victims?

The wailing of the mothers, sisters and wives of the victims of the Khanty-Mansiysk Unit is constantly to be heard in Grozny, and accordingly:

We demand to be told by the Interior Ministry of Russia how much longer the Khanties will be allowed to remain in Grozny;

We insist that Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov should immediately intervene in this ongoing travesty;

We request that the families should have the bones of their dearest returned to them;

We beg Russia’s most senior officials to start behaving like human beings.

Hello, Prosecutor-General’s Office – is anybody there? What is going on with Criminal Case No. 15004 which, according to Novaya gazeta’s information, has been hastily removed from Chechnya? Where is it? Are pages being torn out of it? Are replacement pages being inserted? What guarantee is there that the file will ever be placed before the courts?

Give these undertakings to society. Finally!

PUT THE WITNESSES IN JAIL? ONE OF THE MOST BRUTAL WAR CRIMINALS OF THE SECOND CHECHEN WAR HAS BEEN RELEASED FROM PRISON

July 8, 2002

Sergey Lapin has been set free from the pre-trial detention facility in Pyatigorsk. Such is the ruling of the Pyatigorsk Municipal Court, acting at the behest of Lapin’s self-appointed defenders from the Regional Board of the Prosecutor-General’s Office in the North Caucasus. The grounds for releasing him were simple: The Cadet is no danger to society and can roam free while awaiting trial.

Lapin was arrested in February 2002 and was taken under guard to the investigative detention center in Grozny, where the crimes had been committed. The investigation progressed for a time, but then the atmosphere surrounding Case No. 15004 began to change and The Cadet was transferred to Pyatigorsk Prison. The investigators working on the case were switched around like pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope, and eventually they were all in Essentuki and not in Chechnya at all. As a result nobody treated the excavation of mass graves at the October District Interior Ministry Temporary Office as a matter of any urgency.

In the end what we were beginning to suspect was found to be true: the materials of the investigation had been blatantly “weeded,” and incidents dropped from the indictment which were central to bringing criminal charges against others, together with whom, and often with the direct authorisation of whom, Lapin had committed his crimes. In places the tampering was laughable: the Prosecutors started referring to the officers who were so carefully being exculpated as an “unidentified group of individuals;” this at the end of an investigation where there were not only witnesses but also documents which made it unambiguously clear who was on duty at the Office on which days and at which hour.

It was no laughing matter, however, when the Khanty-Mansiysk Unit was returned to Grozny (on the instructions of President Putin, as we were officially informed by Ivan Golubev, Deputy Interior Minister of the Russian Federation), and the witnesses in the case, until then left to their own devices in Grozny, could no longer risk sleeping two nights in the same bed.

And now we hear that Lapin has been set free until the trial.

There is something fundamentally wrong in Russia. Life has been turned upside-down and the law has no substance. The entire range of public services is put to work on behalf of the criminal: the lawyers, Prosecutors, courts, – and even, sad to relate, public opinion. There is precious little help