In 2020, a critic of the head of the Chechen Republic, Kadyrov, was kidnapped. A little later, a video appears showing the 19-year-old being tortured. Since then there has been no trace of him. Now his comrades-in-arms announce: The young man was killed shortly after his kidnapping.
An opposition activist has been killed in the Russian republic of Chechnya. Salman Tepsurkaev was the administrator of a Telegram channel for the “Adat” movement, which is banned in Russia for its criticism of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. The young man was kidnapped two years ago and killed just nine days later, the movement announced in a statement on its website. According to the activists, they had had information about Tepsurkaev’s death for a long time, but until the end they hoped that it was not genuine. Tepsurkaev was only 19 years old.
The activist was kidnapped on September 6, 2020 in the Russian city of Gelendzhik on the Black Sea coast and taken to Chechnya. According to media reports, the relatives were able to locate the kidnapped man’s smartphone – so it was on a police compound in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. A day later, a torture video surfaced on the Internet. In this you can see how the 19-year-old is forced to sit undressed on a glass bottle.
The investigation into the kidnapping of the young activist was only started in Gelendzhik in November 2020. At this point, the 19-year-old is said to have already been dead.
According to his comrades-in-arms, Tepsurkaev was killed on September 15, 2020 at a military training area in the village of Dschalka near Grozny. “Salman was tied up, a grenade was put in his mouth and blown up from afar,” the movement said in a statement. After that, Tepsurkaev’s remains were handed over to his relatives – with the request to “bury him like a dog”. According to the movement, the activist was buried in an unmarked grave.
“Adat” is one of the largest and most important opposition movements in Chechnya. In the “1ADAT” telegram channel, which Tepsurkaev moderated, she informed more than 40,000 subscribers about human rights violations in the republic, among other things.
Ramzan Kadyrov is a close confidante of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has ruled Grozny with an iron fist since 2007. In the republic, government critics are repeatedly abducted and extrajudicially killed.
