Chechen Bodies Found at Mass Dumping Site

The bodies of dozens of Chechen men, most of them shot, were found Saturday at a mass dumping site close to Russian military headquarters in the separatist republic of Chechnya, just three miles from the capital, Grozny.

During the latest Russian military action in Chechnya, which began in September 1999, thousands of Chechen civilian men have disappeared.

The first bodies to be recovered from the dumping site were typical cases: a 16-year-old boy named Musayev and his friend Magomed Madayev, about two years older, who went missing together in Grozny in December. Musayev’s first name and Madayev’s age were not available from investigators Saturday.

The bodies, in various stages of decomposition, were discovered by a Grozny man early Saturday in a deserted village of weekend shacks.

The corpses went undiscovered for many months because the village, near Russia’s military headquarters in Khankala, was considered highly dangerous by Chechens.

The bodies were scattered throughout the heavily mined village in the Groznensko-Selsky district, a suburban area between Grozny and Khankala. The village was sealed off by the military Saturday to prevent relatives of missing men from coming to search.

There was no official statement from Russian authorities about the bodies Saturday.

But Nadezhda Pogosova, a senior investigator in the Chechen prosecutor’s office, said in a telephone interview that some of the men might have been executed.

The chief prosecutor of Chechnya, Vsevolod Chernov, flew to the area by helicopter from his office in Gudermes on Saturday to examine the site and nearly stepped on a land mine, Pogosova said.

Chernov went into several houses and flew over the area a few times in the helicopter spotting corpses, she said. Several were found in buildings, while others were spotted on the roads and scattered around houses throughout the village. Sappers were called in to clear the area of mines.

Human rights groups speculated Saturday that Russian servicemen at the Khankala base used the village as a disposal site for executed prisoners.

Russian forces in Chechnya have routinely imprisoned and tortured Chechen civilian men, often ransoming them to relatives, according to a detailed report by Human Rights Watch released in October.

Tatyana Kasatkina, executive director of the Human Rights Memorial Center, based in Nazran in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia, said by telephone Saturday that relatives of missing men could sometimes buy a man’s freedom from the Russian base at Khankala.

“But sometimes relatives can only buy back dead bodies, and some missing people are never found. It seems to me that the site may well be Khankala’s dumping site for bodies. We know what is happening in Khankala,” she said.

Kasatkina said Chechen rebels have not controlled the area in more than a year and could not have dumped bodies there in recent months.

“I don’t know why the federal troops didn’t bother to bury them. Maybe they thought that no one would dare to go looking for the bodies so close to Khankala and they decided not to bother to dig the earth in winter. But we need to know more facts to confirm this,” she said.

Some of the bodies had been partially eaten by dogs, and some were in an advanced state of decomposition. Others appeared to have been killed more recently. One was clad in a military jacket, but the rest were wearing civilian clothing, according to Pogosova, the senior investigator.

She said that after news of the discovery spread in Grozny on Saturday, several men went to the area to search for missing relatives, including the father of the 16-year-old Musayev.

He identified the bodies of his son and Madayev. The father had reported his son missing in December.

Those bodies and one other were flown to Gudermes for post-mortems.

There have been hundreds of complaints to Russian authorities about human rights abuses carried out by Russian servicemen in Chechnya. But few cases have been investigated, despite international criticism.

A representative in Moscow of the Russian-installed Chechen government, Abubakar Deniyev, called for an impartial investigation of the killings.

“This sinister news elicits very dark thoughts. If these people were killed recently, so that their bodies are still intact, and they are found so close to Khankala, it may mean that they were rounded up in various places and brought there and then for some reason all shot there,” he said.

“I think it is a matter of honor for our government to see to it that this investigation be conducted in a transparent, unbiased and speedy way,” he said.

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.