By her collegue Tanya Lokshina
“I’m being kidnapped!”: Natalya was heard calling out before she had been abducted by unidentified men in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, where she lived and worked as a human rights defender and later.Natasha was dedicated to exposing the gross misrule of Chechnya today.
Anyone who challenges the authorities risks his/her life.
Among the most recent cases Natalya publicized was that of Madina Yunusova, 20, who married a suspected Chechen militant last month. Yunusova’s husband was killed in early July. Two days later, security forces came to her house, locked her mother, father and two sisters in the adjacent shed, and used gasoline to set the house on fire. The armed men unlocked the shed as they left, and Yunusova’s family managed to put out the fire. The next day, the forces returned — this time bringing Yunusova’s body wrapped in a shroud, along with instructions to bury her “without noise.”
House burnings have become a frequent form of collective punishment by local authorities, with at least two dozen incidents in the past year and a half. Suspected militants and collaborators, their relatives and any other perceived enemy of the regime can be tortured, abducted and assassinated.