Mothers of missing Dagestanis ask Putin for help

Disappearances of men in Dagestan are not investigated for years; and the republic’s authorities give no relevance to the problem, the members of the "Mother's Heart" movement have stated on August 30 at the roundtable timed to the International Day of Missing Persons.

Law enforcers and employees of the Ombudsperson’s office were invited to the roundtable, but failed to appear.

Zhanna Ismailova, the mother of a young man who disappeared in Dagestan, has stated that the republic runs no official statistics of disappearances.

"The North-Caucasian Federal District (NCFD) has registered 7750 missing people; but Dagestan has no such statistics. It’s known only that as of May 2012, there were 1141 missing persons in the republic. The Prosecutor's Office asserts that in the last three years there were 28 of them, although only we have counted 78 missing people; and 13 persons were kidnapped during six months of 2016. Recently, in Khasavyurt, three young men were kidnapped and taken to some unknown place," the “Chernovik” weekly quotes Ms Ismailova as saying.

Mothers of missing residents of Dagestan have sent an appeal to President Vladimir Putin asking him to meet them and help in the inquiry of criminal cases concerning the loss of their sons. Israfil Gadadov, the lawyer of the “Mother's Heart”, has noted that Dagestani disappearance cases should be brought to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), complaining about investigators’ inaction.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.