December 2, 2001

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On the night of December 2, officers of the VOVD of the Urus-Martan district attempted to detain a resident of the village of Gekhi, a possible member of the VF ChRI. But they were resisted: firing back with a pistol, the suspect ran out of the house and disappeared.

  Only after this were the police able to enter the premises where the relatives of the escapee were located. Having shot his brother, Arbi Khaskhanov, they took the women out into the street and, having planted explosives, blew up the house. The body of the murdered man was taken towards the regional center.

On December 4, a policeman came out to the people standing in front of the VOVD building and asked if there were residents of Gekhi among them. To those who responded from the crowd, he showed a corpse lying on the ground in the courtyard of the department. The dead man was identified; he turned out to be Arbi Khaskhanov.

***
At 2.20 in the city of Urus-Martan, up to 30 employees of Russian security forces in camouflage uniforms, some wearing masks, burst into the house at 71 Bolnichnaya Street. They demanded passports from the residents, checked them, and then announced that they were taking with them Rustam Aidul-Kerimovich Makaev, born in 1973, the son of the owner of the house. They told his wife, Luiza Tataeva, that a special operation was being carried out in connection with the assassination attempt on the commandant of the Urus-Martan district, Heydar Gadzhiev. They say that the actions against her husband are connected precisely with this event. He was taken out into the street, put into an UAZ truck that arrived, the number of which he could not remember, and driven away. Most of the participants in the operation left on foot towards the city center. Despite the actual curfew in the city and the danger of running into secrets and ambushes set up on the streets by the military, relatives of Rustam Makaev followed the kidnappers and established that they had entered the territory of the Urus-Martan District VOVD. The next day they hired a lawyer, but he was unable to find out what the kidnapped man was accused of. Employees of the VOVD, as well as representatives of other Russian security forces stationed in the city and region, declared their innocence in the incident. Rustam Makaev disappeared without a trace.

According to his relatives, he did not participate in hostilities against the Russian army and was not a member of the ChRI Military Fleet. He worked and lived in the Nadterechny district and on the eve of his abduction he came to visit his relatives. One of the possible reasons for his detention was that Rustam Makaev was a strongly built, physically developed person. His height was 193 cm and his weight exceeded 90 kg. He had red hair and brown eyes. A distinctive feature can be considered scars from gunshot wounds on the right knee and on the stomach. The abduction was witnessed by his wife and parents. According to them, the kidnappers did not present their documents. Without a doubt they were Russian.

Relatives asked for help in establishing the future fate of Rustam Makaev to the plenipotentiary representative of the President of the Russian Federation for the Southern Federal District Viktor Kazantsev, the head of the administration of the Urus-Martan district Shirvani Yasaev, and the President of Russia. A statement was written and submitted to the prosecutor's office. On the fact of the abduction (Article 126, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), criminal case No. 25169 was opened. However, according to the rule already established in Chechnya, due to the alleged “impossibility of identifying persons involved in the crime” (Clause 3 of Article 195 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the RSFSR), it was soon suspended.

Abdul-Kerim Makaev did not want to put up with investigators’ attempts to divert those responsible for his son’s abduction from responsibility. He filed a complaint in court. He was summoned to the prosecutor's office.
– What, Abdul-Kerim, are you complaining again? - they asked him there.
- Yes.
- When will you stop?
“When my son returns, then I’ll stop,” the father answered.

The Memorial Human Rights Center accepted his statement at the end of February 2006, that is, more than five years after the abduction of his son.

***
On the night of December 2, in the city of Urus-Martan, police officers burst into the home of Yakhita Tsakaeva, who lived with her family at 25 Karl Marx Street. They arrived in two Ural cars.

  The police began to beat the young people who were in the house - the sons of Yakhita Tsakaeva, and did not spare the bedridden Akhmed Tsakaev, born in 1972. During a car accident, his spine was damaged. The man underwent three surgical operations, the last of which was performed on him only in September 2001.

Having mocked the residents to their heart's content, the police began to take out and load the family's property into cars and prepare the house for bombing. Only Akhmed Tsakaev remained in it, who, due to his injury, was unable to move independently. However, the police were not particularly embarrassed by this circumstance. They continued their work, not paying attention to the requests of relatives to allow Ahmed to be taken out of the house. One of the policemen mockingly remarked that he was already not a tenant, so why take him somewhere else?

After much persuasion, the only policeman who was not wearing a mask (according to the Tsakaevs’ assumption, a Bashkir policeman from the Urus-Martan District VOVD) took pity on the mother. He brought a wheelchair, put the patient in it and took him outside.
The Tsakaev family had a young child. On the street, he, like the others, found himself without warm outerwear. While escorting people out of the house and onto the street, the police did not allow anyone to take anything warm with them. There was nothing to wrap the child in. After much begging, the blanket was taken out of the house.

After loading the most valuable property into the vehicles, the house was blown up.

As neighbors suggest, perhaps the reason for this could be the participation of Yakhita Tsakaeva’s husband’s nephew in the WF of the ChRI and putting him on the wanted list because of this.

Based on the bombing of the house, the woman contacted the prosecutor's office of the Urus Martanovsky district, demanding that a criminal case be initiated. She also submitted applications to the Human Rights Center “Memorial” and the bureau of Vladimir Kalamanov.

***
From the location of the military unit near the village of Engena, artillery shelling was carried out on the villages of Verkhnie and Nizhnye Kurchali. Two shells exploded in the Tisayevs' yard and destroyed the house. 30-year-old Larisa Tisaeva was hit in the leg by a shrapnel, and 12-year-old granddaughter Khurmani Tisaeva, who came from the village of Tsentoroi, was wounded in the jaw. Then the girl was operated on three times in Makhachkala. She recovered.

From the book “People Live Here”, Usam Baysaev, Dmitry Grushkin, 2006.