Suspect Vanishes From Kabardino-Balkaria Jail

A former prisoner from Guantanamo Bay has disappeared in Kabardino-Balkaria after being detained in a wave of arrests that followed two days of violence in this North Caucasian republic last October.



Rasul Kudayev’s family say he is being made a scapegoat for the attack by armed insurgents in the local capital Nalchik last year, but they insist he had nothing to do with it – not least because he is sick.



His family say he was tortured while in custody in Nalchik, and now that he has disappeared they fear for his safety.



The authorities are refusing to comment on the case, or even to say what has happened to the missing detainee.



Kudayev, who comes from the village of Khasanya in Kabardino-Balkaria, went to Afghanistan in 2001 for what he said was a course of Islamic education. When the United States-led coalition launched its offensive against the Taleban, its Afghan allies captured Kudayev and several other Russian citizens. The Afghans handed the prisoners over to US custody, and a few months later the group was sent to Guantanamo Bay.



In February 2004, Kudayev and six other Russian nationals were returned to Russia from Guantanamo. Charges brought against them by Russia's chief prosecutor were dropped, and all seven walked free.



The British rights organisation Reprieve, in conjunction with a US law firm, has launched a lawsuit against the US government on behalf of Russian nationals including Kudayev, and other former Guantanamo prisoners.



Kudaev was arrested on October 23 last year, ten days after dozens of people died when suspected Islamic militants attacked police and other security agency offices across Nalchik.



Kudayev's mother Fatima Tekaeva says she and her son heard about the fighting going on in the town only from news broadcasts, as he was at home due to ill-health.



“When the security agencies were attacked in Nalchik, Rasul was lying at home as usual,” she said. “Before his American ordeal, he was strong and healthy, but he returned from Guantanamo an invalid.”



Tekaeva says her son has a heart murmur, a stomach ulcer, and chronic hepatitis and bronchitis, as well as a bullet in his hip dating from his time in Afghanistan.



She recalled how at least 20 armed members of the security forces arrived at the family home to arrest her son on October 23, “They surrounded the house, shouting ‘Stay where you are!’ and ‘Don't move!’ I started calling the neighbours for help. My son Rasul heard me shouting and came out of the house, with difficulty.



“One of the interior [ministry] forces men, who had detained Rasul several times before, immediately ran up to him and started giving orders to handcuff him. I asked to see a permit for his arrest, but they didn't have one. The search warrant had not been signed by a judge. When they took Rasul away, they pushed him about violently with the butt of a rifle and kicked him.”



Two days after Kudayev’s arrest, he was assigned a lawyer, Irina Komissarova, who describes seeing him in a poor state when she came to see him.



“When I came to the pre-trial detention centre to talk to Rasul, two men carried him to me because he couldn't walk. Rasul couldn’t hold up his head. On the right side of his face there was a large haematoma, his eye was full of blood, his head was a strange shape and size, his right leg was broken and he had open wounds on his hands,” she said.



Komissarova filed a complaint with the prosecutor's office alleging that her client had been physically abused during the pre-trial investigation. She was invited into the prosecutor’s office to discuss her allegations, and was thereupon told that she was now barred from acting for Kudayev as she had given evidence in the case.



Two other lawyers in Kabardino-Balkaria, Larisa Dorogova and Inna Golitsyna, have also been barred from defending suspected participants in the October 13 attacks on the same grounds.



When IWPR telephoned Alexei Sovrulin, head of the investigations team from the Russian prosecutor's office for the Southern Federal District, he refused to answer questions, saying, “How do I know who you are? You could be [Chechen extremist Shamil] Basayev's wife." He declined an offer to meet and hung up, on repeated occasions.



On November 11, Russia's deputy chief prosecutor, Nikolai Shepel, confirmed at a press conference in Nalchik that Kudayev was among those arrested for the October attack. “We have proof that he is guilty,” said Shepel. “He admits it, and five witnesses have said he was not only part of the group which planned the assault on the interior ministry sanatorium and the presidential dacha, but that he was the ringleader.”



After journalists and lawyers got hold of photographs of detainees, including Kudayev, showing signs of torture, two senior Russian officials then visited him in jail and apparently showed concern at the treatment he had received.



In a letter he wrote to his family from prison, Kudayev said he was questioned in detail by the Russian president’s representative for the North Caucasus, Dmitry Kozak, and the recently appointed president of Kabardino-Balkaria, Arsen Kanokov.



“Kanokov listened to how they tortured me and the veins on his neck swelled up with anger,” Kudayev’s letter said. “But of course I could not tell them all the details... In short, they saw at first hand the nightmares that go on. Kanokov left very angry. You could see from his face that he isn’t a bad person. And you could see from Kozak's that he is a fair guy.”



Yury Ketov, the public prosecutor for Kabardino-Balkaria, wrote a letter to Moscow human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina saying that the law had been observed and that evidence of physical torture of the inmate could not be “properly confirmed”.



But soon afterwards, Kudayev was removed from Nalchik prison and nothing has been heard from him since. The head of the prison and of the prison’s medical centre have refused to meet Tekaeva or answer her questions.



After hearing reports that he had been transferred to a prison in the Russian town of Piatigorsk, his mother rang the jail, only to be told he was not there.



Kudaev is not the only person who has gone missing in Nalchik since October 13. Ruslan Nakhushev, a civil activist who was local coordinator of the Russian Islamic Heritage movement, went missing in November after being questioning by the local security services.



On January 11, Zaur Pshigotyzhev, who was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the attacks and then released, also went missing in Nalchik. His car was later found in a wood, but his whereabouts are unknown.



Luisa Orazayeva is a correspondent for the Caucasian Knot information service.