31 December 2015, 09:15
Ruslan Kutaev placed into dungeon
Ruslan Kutaev, the president of the Assembly of the Peoples of the Caucasus, sentenced in Chechnya on the charge of drug possession, is placed for 15 days to the dungeon for a mobile phone found in his cell. This was reported by members of the Public Oversight Commission (POC) for Chechnya.
The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that in July 2014, Ruslan Kutaev was sentenced to four years of imprisonment. The president of the Assembly of the Peoples of the Caucasus did not admit his guilt. His defence demanded to hold a new trial in his case; however, the Supreme Court (SC) of Chechnya just reduced his prison sentence by two months.
The international human rights organization "Human Rights Watch" (HRW) has associated the prosecution of Ruslan Kutaev with the fact that on February 18, 2014, at the conference "The deportation of the Chechen people. What it was and whether it is possible to forget?", Ruslan Kutaev criticized the position of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who banned holding on February 23 the memorial events to mark the beginning of the deportation of the Chechen-Ingush people.
On December 29, on the Facebook page of the NGO "The Joint Mobile Group in Chechnya", members of the Chechen POC reported that Ruslan Kutaev had been placed to the dungeon.
Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.