His Wife Killed, Chechen Judge Loses Faith in Law

Said-Alvi Luluyev is a judge. He believes in the law. He even believes in justice. He just doesn’t believe they are possible in Russia.

Luluyev’s 40-year-old wife, Nura, left their home in the Chechen town of Gudermes on June 3 to sell strawberries in Grozny, the republic’s capital. She was detained by masked and armed Russian servicemen, who took her away in an armored personnel carrier. By the end of that day, Luluyev had made a pest of himself with the army, the Federal Security Service (the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB), the chief prosecutor, the military prosecutor--every law enforcement body he could find in the shattered capital.

“They all said they knew nothing,” Luluyev recalled Tuesday in an interview. “But you can tell when people are lying to you.”

Until March 4, Nura Luluyev was one of Chechnya’s “disappeared”--people taken into custody by Russian forces and not seen again. Then her body turned up among 51 corpses discovered at a mass dumping site less than half a mile from Russian military headquarters outside Grozny.

“What blasphemy--to kill an innocent person and bury her like a dog,” Luluyev lamented. “And no one in the government is doing anything about it.”

The group of corpses was the largest uncovered recently, and its proximity to the military headquarters has raised suspicions.

But it’s not an isolated incident: In recent months, bodies have been turning up all over separatist Chechnya. Sometimes they are found in pairs, sometimes half a dozen or more at a time. Usually, the victims were bound and blindfolded. Often, if the bodies are not too badly decomposed, they bear signs of torture--severed ears or fingers, cigarette burns, deep bruises.

The official Russian response has been muted. Human rights workers suspect the military of complicity in the deaths, but Chechnya’s chief prosecutor, Vsevolod Chernov, accused them Tuesday of leaping to conclusions.

“If the authors of this theory have well-founded evidence, they should apply to the prosecutors, not to the mass media,” he told the Interfax news agency. “We, on our part, don’t find it possible to express unchecked theories.”

Chernov noted that many of the bodies were clad in camouflage, Turkish underwear and bandages. “This suggests that there were rebels or mercenaries among those killed,” he said.

Such statements infuriate Luluyev. Being a judge by profession, he knows that executing anyone, including a suspected rebel, without a proper judicial inquiry is illegal. And he knows that if procedures had been followed, his wife would be alive.

He accuses Russian officials of deliberately moving slowly so that the truth never comes out.

“I devoted 20 years of my life to fighting criminality,” he said. “And now that I need the help of the judicial authorities, they do nothing.”

Luluyev, who was trained in the Russian judicial system, lost his job in 1997 when a quasi-independent Chechnya imposed Islamic law and courts. He and his family have scraped by ever since, with his wife’s small trades providing a crucial source of income to feed their four children, who range in age from 6 to 21.

The day she disappeared, Nura Luluyev left home early and by 9 a.m. was operating a booth in Grozny’s northern market with two female cousins, Markha and Raisa Gakayeva. When soldiers started rounding people up, the three women were loaded onto an armored personnel carrier with about half a dozen other people. The camouflaged men who seized them did not identify themselves or provide an explanation for the detention.

When Chechen police officers arrived and asked the masked men for an explanation, they were told not to interfere, witnesses told Said-Alvi Luluyev when he arrived later in the day.

Luluyev was determined to find his wife. On June 23, prosecutors opened an investigation into her abduction. He was assured Feb. 7 by Chernov’s office that the investigation was still underway.

On March 4, Nura’s brother visited a cluster of abandoned summer cottages near Russian military headquarters where dozens of corpses had been discovered in late February. He was told that a temporary morgue had been set up in an airplane hangar. There, even though the bodies were badly decomposed, he identified his sister and cousins from their clothing and jewelry.

“If they had started investigating immediately, while the trail was still warm, they would certainly have been able to find the guilty parties,” Said-Alvi Luluyev said. “But they didn’t even try.

“The most insulting thing is that they detained her just like that, for no reason, then tossed her away like a dog,” he said. “And they won’t even face up to it and recognize the truth.”

The casualness with which the bodies were abandoned--many were lying openly on the ground--suggests there was little attempt to hide them, human rights workers say. The village, a short walk from the base, was heavily mined, which kept local residents at bay.

“It was a convenient place to dump bodies if you know you’re not going to be held accountable,” suggested Diederik Lohman, Moscow director of Human Rights Watch.

Chernov, the Chechnya prosecutor, said 17 of the 51 bodies had been identified and claimed by relatives. The rest were videotaped and quickly buried. He said most of the bodies had gunshot wounds but that they were so decomposed the causes of death could not be determined.

Nadezhda Pogosova, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office, insisted that the investigation is going “full steam ahead.”

“Every criminal case is important for us, even if just one person has disappeared or is missing. That’s why we can’t say that this case is a special one for us,” she said by telephone from Gudermes.

Luluyev would like to work again in the Russian legal system. “After all, I have to feed my family and I have no other expertise,” he said.

But he doubts justice is possible for his wife. “I believe in the law, but I don’t believe [justice] can be achieved,” he said. “There are a lot of laws that look pretty on paper but are ignored in practice.”

And that goes for the West as well as for Russia, he said.

“When a country has a pattern of such incidents, the international community has an obligation to investigate, to demand justice,” Luluyev said. “But it isn’t fulfilling these obligations. I guess they must not be meant for people like us.”

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Yakov Ryzhak of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.