Chechen residents could reject law enforcers' night questioning, experts assert

On the day of opening of the ethnographic complex "Shira-Yurt", the large-scale questioning of Chechen residents by the policemen, who were searching for the mobile phone of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, can be legally justified in case if the law enforcers believed that the mobile phone could have been stolen, says advocate Igor Trunov. However, the expert emphasizes that during the questioning the police had no right to force people to answer their questions.

Such a situation would cause "a huge scandal in any civilized country of the world," the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent was told by retired FSB Colonel Gennady Gudkov, the former Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee for Security. According to him, at first, the owner of the mobile phone was to lodge a complaint stating that his mobile phone had been stolen.

The expert believes that the methods used by the police to search for the mobile phone are "outside the law", since the police are not allowed operating without a complaint lodged by a victim.

According to Igor Trunov, a serious problem is that the people of Chechnya are not aware of their rights and, in particular, of the fact that one can refuse to give explanations during pre-investigation inquiry.

Ramzan Kadyrov personally may be not involved in the questioning, states Oleg Orlov, a member of the board of the Human Rights Centre (HRC) "Memorial".

The allegations that more than one thousand of people have been questioned in the search for the missing mobile phone of the Chechen leader are false, states the Ramzan Kadyrov's page in Instagram.