No torture to continue operating in Chechnya

The Grozny apartment that served as the office of the local monitoring group branch of the Committee to Prevent Torture (KPP) was destroyed by a fire late on December 13, Radio Free Europe reports on Sunday night.

The following day, Grozny police detained two KPP lawyers, Sergei Babinets and Dmitry Dmitriyev, and confiscated from them their mobile phones, two lap-tops, and three cameras, one of which was the property of Al-Jazeera journalists who were visiting Grozny.

Just days earlier, KPP head Igor Kalyapin had antagonized Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov by formally asking Russian Prosecutor-General Yury Chayka and Investigative Committee head Aleksandr Bastrykin to rule on whether Kadyrov had exceeded his authority by issuing orders in the wake of the December 4 insurgent attack on Grozny that the families of known insurgents be deported from Chechnya and their homes burned to the ground.

In the wake of the Grozny protest demonstration, but before the apartment fire, KPP lawyer Andrey Ryzhov affirmed that the organization will continue its work in Chechnya. "There is no point in trying to scare us... We shall remain in Chechnya … and provide support to all those who ask us," Ryzhov wrote on his Facebook page.