In Ingushetia, convict's mother asks human rights defenders for help

Mother of Magomed Tsechoev, condemned for an attack on power agencies of Ingushetia, insists that her son is innocent, asserts that he was tortured and asks human rights activists to meet him in the colony. Tsechoev's case is pending at the European Court for Human Rights for two years already.

On September 18, a meeting took place in the office of the Regional Public Movement "Chechen Committee of National Salvation" of Liudmila Alekseeva, Chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, and V. Borschov, Chairman of the Board of the Fund "Social Partnership" and Head of the Section of Law Enforcement Bodies of the Experts' Council at the Russian Ombudsman, with representatives of human rights organizations of Ingushetia and those citizens of this Republic, who assert that their rights and those of the relatives are breached, in their opinion, by officials from power agencies.

Among the persons who addressed on that day to the human rights activists was Lyubov Magomed-Gireevna Tsechoeva, a resident of the city of Nazran and mother of seven children, whose senior son Magomed-Khamid Ruslanovich Tsechoev, born in 1974, was sentenced on August 3, 2005, to 13 years of imprisonment by the Supreme Court of Ingushetia on charges of attacking power agencies of Ingushetia.

The document runs that Magomed-Khamid had nothing to do with the incriminated crime and gives the statement of Tsechoev himself.

According to his version, he had been detained in his workplace (guarded object of the "Monolith" Construction Company in the city of Magas) on August 2, 2004, by employees of law enforcement bodies who used brute force and gave no explanations of their actions.

According to his explanations, after detention, they demanded from him to confess, with the help of torture (he was tortured with electric current, they put a polyethylene bag over his head to block his breath and beat his organs with truncheons (liver, kidneys and, especially, his head)), of taking part in the attack at night on June 21-22, 2004, on law enforcement structures of Ingushetia.

Tsechoev's mother has stated that he had repeatedly addressed the authorities, the prosecutor's office and public and human rights organizations with a request to defend her son Magomed-Khamid from torture, mockery and humiliation of power agents. She also demanded that the persons guilty of mockery and humiliation be brought to criminal liability according to the current legislation, but all her appeals remained unanswered.

As she said, "this year he was brought to Ingushetia by mistake", where she managed to have a meeting with him; her son had told her that the conditions in his colony "were awful and unbearable. He was permanently kept in the dungeon."

Mother asserts that her son "was forbidden to pray, call home and see his relatives for two years, moreover he was warned that he would not survive there, and his complaints would only aggravate his position." According to her story, Magomed's health is completely ruined, and he has no access even to elementary medical care.