Fear and loathing in Dagestan

Map of Dagestan, Georgia and Environs

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – Dec. 10, 2012)

Doctor Marat Gunashev didn’t even have time to change his slippers when masked law enforcement officials led him out of the surgery room on the morning of Nov. 28 and placed a bag over his head. The patient he was administering anesthesia to was left lying on the table.

In a neighboring wing of the Makhachkala, Dagestan hospital where he worked, his brother-inlaw, surgeon Shamil Gasanov, was detained that same morning.

Just a day earlier, a secret informant linked the two men to the two-year-old murder of the city’s police chief.

The day after the detention, Gasanov, 39, was dead and in the morgue: his head and his upper ribcage was missing, pieces of skin were cut from his body, and his knees and toes were smashed, according to his lawyer. “These were signs of torture,” Gasanov’s lawyer, Gadzhimurad Izmailov, told The Moscow News. “We still don’t know on what grounds he was detained, prosecutors have not responded to requests for information.”

Gunashev, meanwhile, was charged Saturday with being an accessory in the 2010 murder of a Makhachkala police chief. If convicted, he faces life in prison.

Faxed requests for comment to the Investigative Committee that investigates the police chief murder were not answered at press time.

Kidnappings, disappearances and random arrests are still a common by-product of ongoing conflict between local law enforcers and Islamist militants in the restive southern republic of Dagestan. But with the passage of the Magnitsky Act in the United States targeting Russian officials accused of rights abuses, the case comes at a time when law enforcement agencies across the country will come under increased international scrutiny.

But lawyers and family members fear Gasanov may have been the victim of an anonymous tip that actually came from a snubbed lover who had sworn to use her friends in the local security services to get revenge. And the fact that the men were secular doctors with no known links to Islamists or terrorist groups are sparking fears that random people could become targets of fabricated cases or investigative mistakes.

“It’s like 1937, where anonymous letters can lead to arrest,” Marat Gunashev’s wife, Amina, said.

Scant evidence

According to a copy of an arrest warrant for Gunashev and Gasanov obtained by The Moscow News (Gunashev is the brother-in-law of a RIA Novosti employee), the two men were wanted in connection with the February 2010 murder of Makhachkala police chief Akhmed Magomedov.

The chief suspect in the murder is Ibragim Gadzhidayev, the alleged head of an Islamist terrorist cell based in Gimri, Dagestan, according to an official Investigative Committee statement from earlier this year.

“Their two names [Gunashev and Gasanov] were added to the list of suspects,” Gunashev’s lawyer, Zaur Magomedov, told The Moscow News. “Why they were added is not explained. No evidence is given.”

The arrest warrant cites evidence from a source code-named as “Stella,” who alleges that in January 2010, a month before the murder, Gasanov had let unidentified men into his apartment “from which he monitored the movement of the car” of the slain police chief.

The source also alleges that Gunashev and Gasanov had traveled to “various places to offer medical assistance to individuals belonging to the Gimri terrorist group.”

Gunashev’s lawyer, Zaur Magomedov, said he believes the source was a former girlfriend of Gasanov.

“He had close relations with a certain Anisat. He lived on the seventh floor, she lived on the ninth floor of the same building. They were in a relationship for about four years. But they never started a family together,” Magomedov said.

“Then Gasanov decided to marry Gunashev’s sister. When this marriage began to be discussed, threats started coming from Anisat that she would tell friends who work in the security agencies, that she would take revenge.”

According to lawyers and family members, the threatening calls and text messages had continued for months after the Gasanov’s wedding in January 2010.

Dagestani journalists investigating this case have attempted to contact Anisat but to no avail.

Searches

The circumstances of Gasanov’s death remain murky.

Police reports said last week that Gasanov was killed after he opened fire on police officers searching his apartment later on Nov. 28 as part of a counter-terrorist operation. No officers were reported injured in the incident.

According to the police report, a gun, ammunition, and fragments of grenades were found in Gasanov’s apartment. But before the search, relatives and neighbors reported seeing a man being led in with a bag over his head, and then heard a shoot-out.

But Izmailov, Gasanov’s lawyer, said that he was not allowed inside the apartment, and that given the marks on Gasanov’s body, he may have been tortured and died while in the custody of the Investigative Committee earlier that day.

Meanwhile, Gunashev’s lawyer, Zaur Magomedov, was also not allowed inside his client’s apartment during a search on Nov. 29.

According to Amina Gunasheva, her eight-year-old daughter, who witnessed the search, cried out when she saw an officer placing a bag into one of her drawers. Officers reported finding a drug-like substance in Gunashev’s apartment.

‘One informer’

Rights groups in Dagestan say that while religious families and their relatives are often wrongly accused of extremism, secular families are rarely targeted.

But while cases of people informing on others out of revenge are rare, they have been known to happen, Gulnara Rustamova, head of Pravozashchita, a local human rights group formed in 2007, told The Moscow News.

“What is strange about this case is that the murder happened two years ago,” Rustamova, who was notified about the case by one of Gasanov’s relatives, said. “They carried out this punishment based on one informer. But they needed to have at least several witnesses to provide evidence. There’s no guarantee that a neighbor who doesn’t like me won’t get rid of me in this way.”

Complaints to her organization have increased recently, she said, but people are making fewer written complaints.

“Young people see that there’s no accountability, that law enforcement officers accused of abuses only get promotions,” Rustamova said. “They don’t see any point in complaining, so they take matters into their own hands, and join militant groups.”

Oleg Orlov, chairman of the Memorial Human Rights Society, which has documented law enforcers’ abuses in the North Caucasus, says he has never heard of doctors being targeted for treating suspected terrorists ­ more frequent are accusations of bringing food or otherwise knowingly helping suspected terrorists.

“A doctor must give aid to a person regardless of who he is,” Orlov said. “But by law he must also report injuries of a criminal nature to law enforcement. A doctor who has not reported a criminal injury may, theoretically, be prosecuted.”

According to a Yelena Denisenko, who heads Memorial’s branch in Dagestan, a lot of the violations have to do with lack of professionalism among law enforcement officials. “There are enough [investigators]. They just don’t want to do qualified work, they don’t check evidence,” she said.

‘Absolutely secular’

Shamil Gasanov’s parents, meanwhile, were given a written statement from the Interior Ministry that he had never been linked to any suspected militant group. And for her part, Amina Gunasheva still can’t believe that her husband is being held with no evidence linking him to the 2010 murder.

“When I was questioned, I couldn’t even fathom that he was accused of [the murder]. We’re absolutely secular,” she said.

“He was checked recently by the FSB to accompany [Prime Minister Dmitry] Medvedev during a visit [in October]. If there was even a spot on [his reputation], he would not have been allowed anywhere near [the prime minister].”

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