A young Chechen activist who went missing in September 2020 amid reports he was kidnapped by people close to the authorities of the North Caucasus region of Chechnya and later shown on videos being tortured, has been killed, a lawyer for a human rights group in Russia says.
Olga Sadovskaya, a lawyer for the Committee Against Torture group, said Salman Tepsurkayev was dead, though she provided no details or evidence during an interview with vlogger and journalist Katerina Gordeyeva on her YouTubechannel on August 23.
"There is a case, in which we were unable to save a person. He was killed. The case is of Salman Tepsurkayev…. We know that he is dead," Sadovskaya said.
Shortly after Sadovskaya's interview with Gordeyeva, the opposition Telegram channel 1ADAT said it had learned earlier that Tepsurkayev was killed on September 15, 2020, on a military test field in the Chechen village of Dzhalka.
However, the group had "hoped right up until the last moment that this was not true and that Salman was alive."
Tepsurkayev, who openly criticized Chechnya's authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov, went missing in early September 2020 and appeared in an online video days later in which he was seen being tortured and humiliated. He was 19 at the time.
The video showed a naked person -- who identified himself as Tepsurkayev and said he was an administrator with the 1ADAT Telegram channel -- on his knees saying "I am punishing myself."
In a second video posted two days later to a pro-government Instagram channel, Tepsurkayev explained that he had made the first video because of a dispute he'd had with the 1ADAT management and because he regretted the statements he'd made about Chechen police, their relatives, and other authorities.
It is widely suspected that Tepsurkayev made the "confessions" under duress, and the Memorial human rights group at the time called on authorities in Moscow to establish Tepsurkayev's whereabouts and to investigate allegations that he was kidnapped and tortured.
The 1ADAT channel is highly critical of Chechnya's Kremlin-backed leader Kadyrov, who has been widely accused of human rights abuses, including torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings both in Russia and abroad. It publishes information about people who it believes have been kidnapped and are being held by the authorities.
A source at 1ADAT who asked not to be identified told RFE/RL at the time said that Tepsurkayev was not an administrator at the channel but an activist with a Chechen opposition group and sometimes moderated chats for 1ADAT. The source said the channel only learned Tepsurkayev’s real name from the video.
In October 2021, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that Tepsurkayev was illegally kidnapped by a group of men in Chechen police uniforms who used Toyota Camry cars with Chechen license plates. Amnesty International urged Chechen authorities to reveal Tepsurkayev's whereabouts, but that request was ignored.
According to the Committee Against Torture, the Investigative Committee's directorate in Chechnya refused three times to launch a probe into Tepsurkayev's disappearance. In January 2021, the Investigative Committee’s directorate in the Krasnodar Krai region launched a probe into Tepsurkayev's abduction.