It was apparently through the GRU or MUR that information was leaked to the press to show that the Akhmadovs and Baraev had protectors in very high places. A number of Moscow newspapers published material stating that Baraev was in Moscow in August 2000, and stayed in a house on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. It had been ascertained that Baraev
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met with highly placed Russian officials and apparently the cars, which had pulled up at the entrance to Baraev s apartment, included one bearing the number of head of the president s office, Alexander Voloshin.
Possibly president Aushev s statement and the scandalous articles about Baraev s stay in Moscow provided the decisive argument in support of those who wished to eliminate Baraev. The details of his death remain unclear to this day. Supposedly he was killed in his home village of Alkhankala some time between June 22 and 24, 2001, in the course of an operation, which some sources claim was carried out by a division of MVD and FSB forces, while according to other sources it was a GRU special detachment consisting of Chechen nationals. According to information provided by State Duma deputy, MVD General Aslanbek Aslakhanov from Chechnya, Baraev was killed in a blood feud by people whose relatives he had himself killed.
If Baraev had lived, his testimony could have been highly damaging to a number of highly placed officials, as well as members of the secret services and the military. There was nobody who wanted Baraev alive and capable of telling tales which would cast light on so many murky dealings. A dead Baraev could be blamed for any number of things&
If Baraev was the most famous of the kidnappers, Andrei Babitsky, a journalist from the American Radio Liberty, was one of the most unusual victims. Despite the obvious difference between Babitsky s case and other cases of abduction, it provided new proof of the Russian secret services involvement in abduction.
After the start of the second Chechen War, the military authorities in Mozdok refused to give Babitsky accreditation. The requirement for administrative accreditation was unlawful, since a state of emergency had not been declared in Chechnya, and no zone of anti-terrorist operations had ever been declared. According to a decision of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, unpublished enactments of the Russian government or the military departments of state, which infringe the rights and freedoms of the citizen, are to be regarded as null and void. On the basis of this understanding of Russian law, Radio Liberty correspondent and Russian citizen, Andrei Babitsky, traveled to Chechnya in defiance of the administrative prohibition. In late December 1999, he came back from Grozny to Moscow for a few days, bringing with him video footage which was later shown in the program Itogi on the NTV television channel. On December 27, he returned to Grozny, and on January 15, 2000, he was preparing to travel back to Moscow.
On his way out of Grozny on January 16, close to the Urus-Martan intersection on the Rostov-Baku highway, Babitsky and his Chechen assistant were detained at a roadblock manned by the Penza OMON. The statement made by the investigator of the Public Prosecutor s Office claimed that it was a member of the UFSB who searched Babitsky and confiscated his belongings. This provided documentary proof that Babitsky was arrested by the UFSB. He was later handed over to the Chechen OMON, where one of the OMON commanders, Lom-Ali, personally beat him up, after which he handed Babitsky over to Fomin, the head of the FSB department in Urus-Martan.
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Babitsky was officially arrested under a decree on vagrancy, and he was sent to the detention camp at Chernokozovo in order to establish his identity. There, Babitsky was beaten again and forced to sing for hours under torture. In video footage shown on television on February 5, the traces of the beatings were clearly visible. In contravention of the Criminal Law Procedural Code, no report was drawn up of Babitsky s arrest in Chernokozovo. He was denied the right to see his relatives or have a meeting with his lawyer (as stipulated in article 96, part 6 of the Criminal Procedural Code). The General Public Prosecutor s Office of the Russian Federation did not bother to answer queries from lawyers, including those from the famous lawyer, Henry Reznik. Nor was any reply forthcoming to a inquiry about Babitsky from Duma deputy Sergei Yushenkov.
Babitsky s colleagues began looking for him on January 20, but since the Russian authorities denied that he had been detained, it was a week before anything became clear.
On January 27, the authorities announced that Babitsky had been arrested, because he was regarded as a suspect and had been detained for ten days (ending on January 26).
The Public Prosecutor s Office was planning to accuse Babitsky of an offense under article 208 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ( Organizing an illegal armed formation or participating in such a formation ). If our guys have got your friend, and I think they have, then that s it, curtains, you won t be seeing him again. Nobody will.
Sorry to be so blunt, Alexander Yevtushenko, a correspondent of the newspaper Komsomolskaya pravda, was told by an old acquaintance who was an FSB officer.
On February 2 at Chernokozovo, a package was accepted for prisoner Babitsky.
However, the investigator, Yury Cherniavsky, would not permit a meeting with Babitsky, hinting that he would be released in four days. The journalist s release was demanded by Radio Liberty, the Council of Europe, the U.S. State Department, the Union of Journalists, and civil rights activists (including Andrei Sakharov s widow, Elena Bonner). In negotiations with U.S. Secretary of State Albright, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Igor Ivanov stated that acting president Putin personally had the situation under control.
At 4 p.m. on February 2, the prosecutor of the Naur District of Chechnya, Vitaly Tkachyov, announced that Babitsky s preventive detention had been replaced by a signed undertaking not to leave Moscow, where he was on the point of being sent from Gudermes. Later, the press secretary of the Public Prosecutor s Office of the Russian Federation, Sergei Prokopov, announced that Babitsky had been released on February 2. (Only later did it emerge that Babitsky was not released, and he spent the night of February 2 in a motorized cell, a truck used for transporting detainees. At three o clock the following afternoon, with barely a sign of embarrassment, Yastrzhembsky declared that after being freed, Babitsky had been exchanged for three prisoners of war. Then he corrected himself and said it was for two.) Since Babitsky was wearing a shirt that had been sent to Chernokozovo on February 2, the obvious conclusion was that he had been handed over on February 3. No one in Chechnya knew the Chechen field commanders, to whom Moscow claimed Babitsky
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had been handed over in exchange for captive Russian military personnel. President of Chechnya Maskhadov declared that he did not know where Babitsky was. And no one had seen the exchanged Russian soldiers.
In actual fact, apart from Babitsky all the individuals involved in the exchange were members of the FSB. One of them, a Chechen working for the FSB, had helped to hoodwink Babitsky, and when Babitsky realized what was going on, it was too late. In an interview on NTV on the evening of February 8, Russian Minister of the Interior Ivan Golubev announced that he had made the decision to exchange Babitsky. But another official tried to convince journalists that the exchange had been a local initiative, and the Kremlin was looking into who was responsible for what had happened, because the Babitsky affair was working against Putin.
Official government spokesmen claimed that Babitsky was alive, and that a video recording which confirmed this would arrive in Moscow the next day. In fact, the videotape was handed over to Radio Liberty by persons unknown on the evening of February 8, sooner than promised. One of the Chechens who had supposedly traveled from Chechnya to hand over the tape was wearing an MVD uniform. The video footage showed Babitsky in an exhausted condition.
Journalists who analyzed the tape said that the way Babitsky was taken by the arms was typical of the police, but that Chechens did not handle people that way. In fact, not even the members of the FSB who were involved in the exchange made any real effort to conceal the falsification. When an FSB department was celebrating the anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghani stan, one of them confessed to Alexander Yevtushenko: You saw the warriors in ma sks. And the one who grabbed hold of Babitsky. They showed it on television. Well, that was me.
The area where the exchange took place was not far from Shali, which was entirely under the control of federal forces and not far from the village of Nesker-Yurt, also under federal control, where there were federal so ldiers and fortified roadblocks and armored personnel carriers. The people in masks drove off with Babitsky and took him, as it turned out later, to the Chechen village of Avtury. Although this village was not yet occupied by federal forces, the journalist did not by any means end up among resistance fighters. He became a prisoner in the house of relatives of Adam Deniev, well-known for his collaboration with the Moscow author ities (his religious and pro-imperial organization Adamalla had an office in Mosc ow). In this house Babitsky was detained for three weeks, without being permitted to make contact with the outside world.
On February 23, the kidnappers led Andrei out of the house, ordered him to lie down inside the trunk of a Volga, and drove him to Dagestan. On this day-the anniversary of the deportation of the Chechens-the numbe r of soldiers at federal checkpoints was greatly increased and the residents of Chec hnya preferred not to leave their homes any more than was necessary, but the kidnappers cars-the Volga and the Zhiguli that accompanied it-were never stopped: at each checkpoint, the drivers merely slowed down in order to show some kind of document.
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In this way, Babitsky was brought to Mahac hkala. Here he was given a passport with someone else s name, but with a professi onally attached photograph of himself (as it turned out later, a blank passport with this number had been issued, perfectly legally, by one of the passport offices of the MVD). The kidnappers demanded that Babitsky should cross the border into Azerbaijan with this pa ssport. But Andrei managed to escape. After returning to Mahachkala, he called his frie nds from his hotel (where he had been compelled to use the false passport) and the world finally found out that the journalist was alive. Then he gave himself over to the Dagestan police.
Despite the fact that the policemen late r received medals for the rescuing Andrei, Babitsky himself was accused by the authorities of using a false passport, held for several days in a jail in Mahachkala, and later tried, sentenced to a heavy fine, but pardoned&
For some reason the General Public Prosecutor s Office was not interested in the fact that Babitsky had been abducted, beaten, and tortured, but for the half-dead victim to be using someone else s passport was clearly a serious crime. The passport became the basis for the main charge in Babitsky s case.
Throughout all of this, of course, the structures of coercion and the officials involved in the Babitsky affair were confident that they could act with absolute impunity, and this confidence was based on the fact that Babitsky s suppression had been sanctioned by the leadership of the FSB.
Almost all of the partipants in this incident are known. We have already mentioned Deniev s group. The person who arranged Andrei s exchange has also been identified as FSB Colonel Igor Petelin (recognized in the television footage by Novaya Gazeta s military correspondent Vyacheslav Izmailov). And Andrei himself later saw a photograph of one of his kidnappers in the newspaper-as one of the bodyguards of the current president of Chechnya Akhmad Kadyrov.
In the war in Chechnya, the secret services carried out reprisals against their enemies without the slightest regard for the law. The strange story of the kidnapping of Kenneth Gluck, the representative of an American medical charity, on January 9, 2001, close to the Chechen village of Starye Atagi, led many people to suspect that Gluck had been abducted by the Russian special forces. At a press conference in St. Petersburg on April, 18 2001, Zdanovich made it clear in Patrushev s presence that the FSB had no interest in Gluck s work in Chechnya: the FSB, to put it mildly, has grave doubts about whether Kenneth Gluck was really a representative of a humanitarian organization. After this, Zdanovich claimed that the well known field commander and trader in hostages, Rezvan Chitigov, worked for the CIA in Chechnya.
It became clear that the FSB regarded Gluck as a CIA agent involved in spying for the United States. This was apparently the reason, the FSB had decided to exclude him from the Chechen republic. First, Gluck was kidnapped and then on February 4, his liberation
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was stage-managed without any conditions or ransom as a result of a special operation carried out by FSB agents.
It was absolutely clear to everyone that no special operation had been carried out to free Gluck, and he had simply been set free by his abductors, who had decided not to kill him.
After the Babitsky case, the FSB no longer bothered to use conspiratorial methods, having come to believe in its own absolute impunity. The reality of the Gluck case was no less obvious. Everybody could tell that Gluck had been abducted by the FSB. That s why the whole business of Gluck s capture and release was so strange, Zdanovich declared at one of the press conferences. It would be hard to disagree with him. When one and the same organization kidnaps someone and then liberates him, it really does look rather strange.
Against this background, the story of the kidnapping by GRU operatives of, former chairman of the Chechen parliament, Ruslan Alikhadjiev, seems almost natural and lawful. Having been a successful field commander during the first Chechen war, Alikhadjiev did not take part in the military operations of 1999-2000. In mid-May 2000, he was detained in his own house in Shali. According to local people, the arrest was carried out by agents of the General Staff GRU, who took the former speaker of parliament to Argun, where his trail went cold.
After May 15, not even Alikhadjiev s lawyer, Abdulla Khamzaev, ever saw him again.
Khamzaev said that he made repeated inquiries at various levels concerning the fate of his client, but was never able to meet with him. Information emerged from the Public Prosecutor s Office that a criminal investigation had been initiated into Alikhadjiev s disappearance under article 126 of the Criminal Code (abduction). The Prosecutor s Office had not initiated criminal proceedings against Alikhadjiev and, consequently, had not sanctioned his detention. The MVD knew nothing about what had happened to Alikhadjiev. On June 8, 2000, Khamzaev was notified by the FSB that Alikhadjiev was not in the FSB s Lefortovo detention center. Khamzaev did not receive any answer to his inquiry from the General Public Prosecutor s Office. Finally on September 3, the radio station Moscow Echo reported that Alikhadjiev had died of a heart attack in Lefortovo, and his family had already been officially notified of his death.