| OneHungLo |
01-19-2019 08:14 PM |
Muslim Authorities Order Families to Kill LGBT Family Members, Also Pay Ransoms
Quote:
Russian campaigners have told The Daily Beast that Chechen authorities have ordered people to kill LGBT members of their own families, and have demanded ransoms for the release of detained LGBT relatives.
According to reports, at least 40 people have been arrested in the last two to three weeks, many of them tortured, in a new crackdown against LGBT people in Chechnya. Two gay men have reportedly died following torture.
“Chechen authorities demanded that relatives punish their gay family members by executing them,” one of the St. Petersburg volunteers for the Russian LGBT Network, who did not wish to be named, told The Daily Beast. “Several people who managed to escape have been raped with police clubs and tortured with electricity.”
The detentions were reportedly carried out by law enforcement officers in the southern city of Argun.
Alvi Karimov, spokesman for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, told reporters Monday the reports are “complete lies and don’t have an ounce of truth in them.”
Svetlana Gannushkina, a prominent human rights defender, told The Daily Beast that on a recent afternoon she had received phone calls from a Chechen family, asking her to help an arrested male relative.
Gannushkina is a former member of the presidential Council of Civil Society and Human Rights in Moscow. “People in Chechnya believe that I can make a few phone calls and save their loved ones. This family asked me to help after police had arrested their relative and demanded one million rubles ($15,090) from them, otherwise the entire republic would know that they had a gay family member; and they said they would kill their boy. So there were two threats.”
Gannushkina put the family in touch with an attorney. On Jan. 10 she heard the man was free. “The police most probably took their money,” Gannushkina, now the head of Civil Assistance Committee, an NGO, told The Daily Beast on Thursday. “This situation sounded like one more awful atrocity in Kadyrov's Chechnya.”
A human rights campaigner in Chechnya, who declined to be named, told The Daily Beast that the recently detained gay men and women were threatened with prosecution under article #221 of the country’s criminal code, possession of drugs.
By Tuesday night, according to the human rights defender, police had released the detained gay men and women, who signed away their right to leave the republic. According to the source, officials retained the passports of the released LGBT people.
Since 2017, Russian and international LGBT networks have managed to help 150 Chechen victims of violence escape to Western countries. To evacuate one gay person from Chechnya abroad, volunteers have to raise up to 4,000 euros ($4,544).
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Can someone send Bladewire to this man? Please?
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