The European Court of Human Rights awarded 26 thousand euros each to two Dagestan human rights activists Svetlana Anokhina and Maysarat Kilyaskhanova in the case of police storming the shelter from where Chechen Khalimat Taramova was taken. The human rights activists themselves told Sota about the ECHR decision.
Compensation was also awarded to Iraida Smirnova, who was hiding in a crisis apartment at the time.
The police storming of the shelter in which Chechen Khalimat Taramova, who had fled from beatings in her family, was hiding, occurred on June 10, 2021. Then the security forces broke into the crisis apartment and forcibly took Taramova back to Chechnya, where they “expelled the genies” from her.
During the arrest, the police used physical force – human rights activist and journalist Svetlana Anokhina was dragged down the stairs, Iraida Smirnova and Maysarat Kilyaskhanova were grabbed by the arms, injuring them.
“The barefoot women were dragged down the stairs by their limbs, dropped several times along the road, and then forced into a police car. The applicants were taken to the Leninsky district police station and released the next day. After forcing the applicants out of the shelter, police officers broke the shelter’s CCTV cameras and confiscated the cards memory from the applicants’ personal devices,” says the ECHR website.
At the same time, the Russian Investigative Committee several times refused to initiate a criminal case due to the police storming the shelter. From the refusal order it followed that the girl’s father, Ayub Taramov, told the police that his daughter was being treated for drug addiction and was not accounting for her actions. According to his version, Khalimat was forcibly kept in a crisis apartment, taking advantage of her condition.
Khalimat Taramova fled from Grozny to Makhachkala on June 4, where she was staying in a shelter for women in crisis situations. Shortly before this, the girl published a video message in which she asked not to look for her and explained that she was fleeing Chechnya from constant beatings in her family.
Khalimat and her girlfriend Anna Manylova took refuge in Makhachkala because they could not leave Russia due to coronavirus restrictions. On the evening of June 10, Dagestani and Chechen security forces burst into a shelter for survivors of violence, detained several people, and handed Khalimat over to relatives. According to human rights activists, Khalimat Taramova is the daughter of one of the close associates of the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, director of the Grand Park shopping center Ayub Taramov.
In an interview with Kavkaz.Realii, Taramova said that she was forcibly married, asked for a divorce, but her relatives forcibly kept her at home and beat her. Taramova’s friend Anna Manylova told Present Time that the girl had been locked up for six months before escaping.
Minister of National Policy, External Relations, Press and Information Akhmed Dudayev, in turn, blamed human rights activists for the incident who tried to help the girl leave the Caucasus. Later, the Chechen TV channel Grozny TV released a 35-minute special report about the “attempted abduction” of Khalimat Taramova. In an interview, the girl says that she “doesn’t remember” how she ended up in a shelter in Makhachkala. According to her, she is surrounded by her family, and her rights are not violated in any way.
Anna Manylova told Meduza that Khalimat contacted her shortly after the story was published on ChGTRK Grozny. She apologized for not having the courage to publicly tell the truth and asked Anna to “post” photos of them together and “do everything so that they don’t forget about her.”
On the morning of August 11, a message appeared in the telegram channel of the Baza publication that Khalimat Taramova allegedly tried to escape a second time, but she was detained at the border of Chechnya and Dagestan, tracked by cameras, and now she is home again.
On September 5, a new video message from Taramova appeared on social networks.
“I am forced to make a video due to the fact that people are spreading false rumors that I was killed, I am being kept in a basement, I am being oppressed. I want to bring to your attention that I was not killed, that I am fine. I am in my circle family, relatives and friends,” she says.
