By James Kilner (with Angus MacSwan), "Russia torture accuser disappears - rights groups" -Reuters - USAWednesday, August 6, 2008
A man who has publicly accused soldiers loyal to Chechnya's President Ramzan Kadyrov of abducting and torturing him has disappeared in the southern Russian republic, human rights groups said on Wednesday.
Mukhamadsalakh Masayev had spoken to rights groups and given an interview to the Novaya Gazeta newspaper last month in which he said Kadyrov's soldiers of seized him in 2006. He planned to bring a legal action against them.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said witnesses had seen camouflaged men stop Masayev in central Grozny on Sunday and pull him into their car. He has not been seen or heard of since, HRW said in a letter to Grozny's Prosecutor-General on Wednesday.
(...)
Masayev, a native of Chechnya who lived in Moscow, told human rights groups that Kadyrov's soldiers had abducted him because he preached Salafism -- a conservative form of Islam linked to the strict Wahhabism strand from Saudi Arabia.
Chechnya is a republic of about 1 million on the southern fringe of Russia which has traditionally practised the Sufism more mystical form of Islam.
[Picture: View of a gorge in the Caucasus Mountains in Chechnya. Early color photograph from Russia, created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915. Photo from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechnya].
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