Milashina complains about red tape in inquiry into beating in Grozny

Investigators in Grozny began investigating the beating case of the journalist, Elena Milashina, and the advocate, Marina Dubrovina, only a month after the incident; to achieve this, she had to go to Chechnya and personally complain to the local prosecutor, Ms Milashina has explained.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on February 6, Elena Milashina and the Krasnodar lawyer Marina Dubrovina were attacked by a group of men and women in a Grozny hotel. The local police reported that they had started a check on the journalist's application, but ten days later Milashina complained that Chechen policemen even hadn't requested the videos records from the hotel surveillance cameras, which could help in identifying the attackers.

"The crime that could have been solved in one day – it was enough to seize and watch videos from surveillance cameras – remains unsolved. Now, evidence and proofs are likely to be lost. Moreover, not only a criminal case has not yet been opened on the fact of the attack on us, there isn't even a decision on who – the police or the Investigating Committee – and which investigator is in charge of investigating it," Elena Milashina complained to Dmitry Pikhula, the Leninsky District Prosecutor of Grozny.

According to her story, the prosecutor asked to write a complaint to his name, and promised to give written answers thereto. "The next day, on March 12, we indeed receive a response to our complaint. It states that our applications had been transferred from the police to the prosecutor's office, from there – to the Investigating Committee, from there – to the police, from there – to the prosecutor's office, and from the prosecutor's office, on March 10 (by a strange coincidence exactly on the eve of our arrival in Chechnya), – again to the Investigating Committee," Elena Milashina wrote in her article.

On March 12, when Milashina and Dubrovina had already left Chechnya, Elena, according to her story, received a call from an investigator of the Chechen Department of the Investigating Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF) who said that he had been instructed to investigate the attack on them.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on March 15, 2020 at 05:03 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.