Borozdinovskaia victims still missing

The whereabouts and further destiny of 11 residents of Borozdinovskaia, Shelkovskaia district, detained and brought away by officers of some law enforcement or security agency in the process of a punitive "clean-up" conducted in this village on 4 June this year have so far been unknown.

After long talks and promises, Chechnya's authorities were able to have back in Chechnya hundreds of ethnic Dagestanis who had fled to the neighbouring Kizliar district, Dagestan, after the bloody "developments in Borozdinovskaia. Now the village streets are guarded on a 24-hour basis by officers of the Shelkovskaia District Division of Internal Affairs. There are two checkpoints at the entrances to the village and the shaping of a village police station of local residents is under way. Compensations have been promised to those aggrieved.

However, there is still no answer to the main question: where the 11 villagers abducted by the "military men" are. Some local residents believe the military killed them.

"After the '"clean-up,' we found burnt remains of people. It is not ruled out our fellow villagers or some, if not all, of them were killed and burnt by the Yamadayevtsy (Borozdinovskaia residents are convinced the ""special operation" in the village was conducted by troops of the Vostok battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Sulim Yamadayev, a former brigadier general of Ichkeria - ed.). It has been promised to us that all necessary measures will be taken to find and release our guys, but neither the local authorities, nor the prosecutor's office, nor the Internal Affairs Ministry or the military have learnt anything as yet, as it were," a village resident told Caucasian Knot.

Chechnya's Internal Affairs Ministry declined any comment on the "developments in Borozdinovskaia. "The Russian Prosecutor General's Office is handling this case. The investigation into what happened in Borozdinovskaia is under way, so it would be wrong to make any conclusions or assumptions before it is over," an Internal Affairs Ministry officer said. "More so, that this is not our operation."

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