August 29, 2001

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The Russian military broke into a residential building on the outskirts of the city of Shali (near the former tankodrome). The owner managed to escape, leaving behind his wife, born in 1981, the mother of an infant, who had just been discharged from the maternity hospital the day before (name and surname are not given for ethical reasons). The military attacked her and severely beat her, and then raped her. At the same time, they demanded money, gold and vodka from their victim. Having robbed the house, they left the scene of the crime. The next day, the woman was taken to the hospital in critical condition.

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An armored personnel carrier was blown up in the village of Tsotsin-Yurt. The Russian military opened fire indiscriminately; six civilians received gunshot wounds of varying severity.

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On the night of August 29, forced migrants from Chechnya living in the Sputnik, Bella, Alina and Satsita tent camps on the outskirts of the Ordzhonikidzevskaya station were awakened by explosions of large-caliber shells. Two shells fell about a kilometer from the Sputnik, the third exploded further from it, across the river. A little earlier, two more shells exploded on the territory of Chechnya, a few kilometers from the place where the refugees live.
Eyewitnesses claim that the shelling was carried out from the Kavkaz-1 checkpoint on the Rostov-Baku highway, next to which a large military unit is deployed. They fired, apparently, from howitzers or regimental mortars, and all this happened within 25 minutes. From the gaps, funnels with a diameter of one meter and a depth of half a meter were formed.

Until the morning, the inhabitants of the tent camps did not close their eyes, and in the morning they collected fragments from the shells. Most believe that the shelling is not an accident. He, in their opinion, was committed intentionally in order to intimidate them and force them to leave the camp. “We are being smoked out,” people said in conversations with representatives of human rights organizations. According to the majority of respondents, the authorities create unbearable conditions in Ingushetia, comparable to those in unsafe Chechnya. Only in one camp "Sputnik", next to which the shells fell, we recall, there are more than 8 thousand internally displaced persons.

From the book "People Live Here", Usam Baisaev, Dmitry Grushkin, 2006