Chechen Woman Accuses 4 Russian Soldiers of Rape

A seamstress from this Chechen town has charged that she was raped and robbed at gunpoint by four masked Russian soldiers on Christmas night.

Olga Alexandrovna Sokolova, 40, told local officials that four men identified themselves as soldiers and then forced their way into her home by threatening to blow it up with a grenade if she refused to open the door. Once inside, Sokolova said in a written statement, the soldiers stole her family’s entire supply of food, her wedding ring and other possessions while one held her at bay with a machine gun.

Then, she said, “they led me into the third room and . . . began to rape me.”

Local officials who interviewed Sokolova the day after the alleged attack said they found her accusation credible. But a Russian officer stationed here rejected the allegation, saying it was part of a Chechen propaganda campaign to discredit the Russian forces who invaded Chechnya on Dec. 11 to reassert Moscow’s authority over the breakaway republic.

The accusation is the first rape charge leveled against Russian troops fighting what is becoming an increasingly brutal war against civilians.

Russian troops entered Assinovskaya, a town of 8,300 located about 35 miles west of Grozny, shortly after the Chechen invasion began and established a command post here on the main highway that runs along the northern edge of the village to the capital.

In her statement, Sokolova said a group of Russian soldiers knocked on her door and demanded entrance at 11 p.m. Dec. 25.

“I told them, ‘I will not open the door,’ ” she said in the statement, which was signed and dated Dec. 26. “They said that they will throw a grenade. I opened the door.” The troops barged into the house, Sokolova said, and proceeded to help themselves to the family’s possessions. “They took my wedding ring,” she said in the statement.

“They drank my liquor while one held a machine gun on me; after that they led me into the third room and four people began to rape me. They were in masks.

“I was compelled to leave,” she wrote in the statement, which was addressed to local government authorities. “I ask you to help.”