Aina Mankieva was questioned by officers from two law enforcement agencies.

The problem of domestic violence in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya affects women of all ages, but it is primarily young women under 30 who seek to escape it, human rights activists from the Ad Rem team noted in their report. The problem of evacuating victims of domestic violence is most acute in these regions, where authorities and security forces side with domestic abusers. In June 2023, the BBC released a documentary, "When I Escaped," about young women from the North Caucasus who managed to escape their families' control. For victims of domestic violence, escape often becomes the only chance to save their lives, human rights activists emphasized. Ayna spent the entire night at the police station. Officers spoke with her for two hours. However, her lawyer was never shown the detention report or given the grounds for it. A lawyer was allowed to see Aina after a conversation with her, the SOS* Investigative Committee Crisis Group reported today.

Two employees of the Center for Combating Extremism have already visited the department and asked Aina about her family. There is currently a high risk that Aina will be taken to a temporary detention facility, from where she will be transferred to Ingushetia, human rights activists reported.

They noted that the criminal case became known after human rights activists restored Aina's documents, including her passport, and she began receiving pension payments on her card. "Aina is visually impaired and entitled to a pension. No one cared for her health at home, and her relatives collected her pension. For almost six months, the relatives received the pension for a person who no longer lived with them. And at the end of November, the pension began to arrive on Aina's newly issued card—she was now able to manage the money herself. We can't say for sure that the criminal case, which appeared out of nowhere, is connected to the fact that her relatives stopped receiving the money. But it turns out that for six months, there was no talk of any theft, and the relatives only remembered that something had been stolen a month after they lost access to someone else's pension," the publication states.

Batal-haji and his followers

As a reminder, Ayna's family belongs to the influential Batalhaji community; her father was previously arrested for child trafficking. 1 Ayna herself is visually impaired, and she was "subjected to violence in her family since childhood," human rights activists added. They are convinced that the theft case, which was "discovered" only eight months later, was fabricated to bring the girl home. Seda Suleimanova was similarly accused of theft, "but the criminal case disappeared as soon as she arrived in the republic."

Seda Suleimanova, a native of Chechnya, was detained in St. Petersburg in August 2023 and taken against her will to live with relatives in Chechnya. There has been no news from her since. Her friends and human rights activists have received information that she was the victim of a so-called "honor killing." In April 2024, it became known that the Investigative Committee was investigating the girl's disappearance under the article on murder, according to the "Caucasian Knot" report "The Abduction of Seda Suleimanova".

* are listed as foreign agents.

** Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) is banned in Russia.