Prominent investigative journalist Yelena Milashina was severely beaten by masked men who broke her fingers as she traveled to a court in the Russian republic of Chechnya, her colleagues reported.

Milashina had received death threats in the past from Chechnya’s notorious leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.

She was traveling with a lawyer, Alexander Nemov, who was also injured when she was attacked.

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They had just arrived at the airport to attend the verdict of a mother of three who had been expelled from Kadyrov.

Their car was stopped on the way to the capital Grozny, where Zarema Musayeva was sentenced that day to five and a half years in prison.

Musayeva was detained by Chechen security forces in January 2022 at her apartment in western Russia. She was found guilty of defrauding and assaulting a police officer.

Meanwhile, the journalist described the attack on her as a “classic kidnapping.”

“They restrained us and then threw our driver out of his car, got in, bowed our heads, tied my hands, forced me to my knees and put me on a gun to the head”, he told a Chechen human rights official at a Grozny hospital.

The newspaper he works for, Novaya Gazeta – which was forced to close its operations under pressure from the Russian government – reported that it internal brain injury and that he broken fingers. They also shaved his head and sprayed his face with green dye.

The human rights group Crew Against Torture published an image showing a cut on his leg, in what he believes was a knife wound.

Milashina fled Russia for a while in February 2022 after she Kadyrov called her a terrorist. The Chechen leader also said that “we have always eliminated terrorists and their accomplices”.

In 2020, the journalist was also attacked, along with another lawyer, Marina Dubrovina, after exposing the torture of gays in Chechnya.

Her investigative report detailing human rights violations follows in the footsteps of two women who they were killed for the same work.

In 2006, her colleague Anna Politkovskaya from the Novaya Gazeta outlet was murdered in Moscow, while her friend and activist Natalia Estemirova was kidnapped and shot in Grozny.

Milashina told the BBC’s Ukrainecast last week that she was fully aware that Kadyrov and his entourage could “easily carry out” the death threats he had made.

“I am getting used to it because several times a year Kadyrov makes threats to me or to journalists from Novaya Gazeta… He acts like [él] was the owner of the Chechnya region”.

Zarema Musayeva was found guilty of fraud and assault on a police officer, charges that human rights groups say are false. Photo: CREW AGAINST TORTURE

The leader of Chechnya

Ramzan Kadyrov is one of them staunch supporters of Vladimir Putin, and, moreover, strongly supports their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The politician is accused of ordering extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and torture.

Last year sent Chechen troops known as “Kadyrovtsy” to Ukraine, where they are known for their brutality. He is also linked to the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

Putin handed him over the presidency of the South Russian Republic in 2007, three years after his father was assassinated while he was president in 2004.

When 53-year-old Zarema Musayeva was detained by Chechen security agents 1,800 kilometers north of Grozny last year, Kadyrov said her entire family should be “in prison or underground.”

Musayeva’s three children fled Chechnya after speaking out online about the Chechen leader’s human rights abuses. Her husband, a former judge, was detained for a while, but then also fled.