Gay from Chechnya was detained at Domodedovo airport and taken to the basement

At Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, the police detained a Chechen man, Idris Arsamikov, who was previously hiding from persecution due to his homosexuality. This is reported by the human rights project of the IC SOS Crisis Group, which helps LGBT people of the North Caucasus and their relatives.

Before communication with him was cut off, 28-year-old Arsamikov managed to report that the border guards took him to the basement. The police informed him that they had sent employees of the Chechen law enforcement agencies after him and that the detention was connected with “some problems” in Chechnya.

Arsamikov came from the Netherlands to Chechnya for his father’s funeral. There he was detained and beaten, but then released.

The lawyer who arrived at the airport was not allowed to see Arsamikov before the arrival of the “initiators” of the detention – representatives of the Chechen Republic. According to the police, Arsamikov was detained on a tip from Chechnya, the lawyer said.

Arsamikov himself explains that he is being persecuted because of homosexuality. In Chechnya, the emu is in mortal danger, human rights activists note.

According to “SK SOS”, Arsamikov was first detained near Grozny in the summer of 2018. He was kept in the basement and questioned, since it became known about his intimate relationship with a man. Then Arsamikov was able to leave Chechnya with the help of human rights activists and emigrate to the Netherlands.

• Chechen authorities regularly persecute representatives of the LGBT community in the republic. Information about this was contained in the report of the Austrian expert Wolfgang Bendek for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He directly linked the campaign against Chechen gays with the position of both the republican and federal authorities. Among those responsible for the persecution, he named Ramzan Kadyrov and the Speaker of the Chechen Parliament Magomed Daudov.
• Human rights organizations, the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States called on the Russian authorities to thoroughly investigate all reports of acts of violence against representatives of the LGBT community. After the investigation, the Ministry of Justice of Russia announced that it had not found gays in Chechnya, nor had their rights been violated.