What happens to a man after he is picked up by the FSB? Not the Cheka of 1937, not the Cheka of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag, but the one funded by today’s taxpayers? Nobody has any hard facts, but everybody is frightened, just as people used to be.
And just as under the Soviet regime, only rarely does any information get out. One of those rare instances is the case of Islam Hasuhanov.
According to the file of Criminal Case No. 56/17, Islam Hasuhanov was arrested on April 27, 2002, on Mayakovsky Street in Shali, and charged under Article 222 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation with “being in possession of and bearing firearms.” The wording would lead one to expect some evidence of the alleged weapons.
In fact, armed individuals wearing masks, as is usual in Chechnya, burst at dawn into the house of Hasuhanov’s relatives, where he was living with his family. They dragged him off to an unknown destination without bothering to plant any firearms on him; he had none of his own. The federal special units operating in Chechnya in the search for “international terrorists” have long been confident that they can behave, no matter how despicably, with impunity. This time they were acting on a tip-off from an informer, and had no doubt they were picking up one of the leaders of an IAF whose fate was already sealed. As he would not be surviving, no pistol, no assault rifle was registered as material evidence.
The charge under Article 222 was allowed to stand anyway. The false date of April 27 was also left intact. Missing weeks are characteristic of the antiterrorist operation in Chechnya. A man is arrested and goes missing. The first seven days of his detention are the most brutal. No organization is responsible for him; none of the security agencies admits to knowing anything about him. His relatives search desperately, but it is as if he does not exist. It is during this time that the intelligence services beat everything they need out of him.
Hasuhanov has barely any recollection of the period between April 20 and 27. Beatings, injections, more beatings, more injections. Nothing beyond that. The record of the court hearing ten months after that terrible week states: “For the first seven days I was held in the FSB building in Shali, where I was beaten. Dating from that time I have 14 broken ribs, one rib in my kidney.”
What did the authorities want to get out of Hasuhanov before he died from his injuries? They demanded that he lead them to Maskhadov.[3] After that he could die. The trouble was, Hasuhanov didn’t take them to Maskhadov, and with the robust good health of a submarine officer, he didn’t die, either.
On April 30 it was decided to formalize the case against him. He was dragged off (the public prosecutor of Chechnya at the time was Alexander Nikitin) to a temporary interrogation unit in another Chechen district center, Znamenskaya. This village was blasted from the face of the earth by a female suicide bomber on May 12, 2003. Afterward there was general satisfaction in Chechnya, where most people felt that justice had been done at last. How many people had been tortured there and were secretly buried in the area?
When Hasuhanov arrived in Znamenskaya, he looked like death. His body resembled a sack, but he was breathing. The torture continued under the supervision of Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Cherepnev, deputy head of the investigative section of the directorate of the FSB for Chechnya. Cherepnev was to be the main investigator in the Hasuhanov case, deciding on the level of torture and directing the process to obtain the required evidence.
From the court record:
“Why were violent means being used against you?”
“In all the interviews, all they were interested in was where Maskhadov was and where the submarine was that I supposedly was intending to hijack. Those were the two questions in connection with which violent means were used against me.”
Hasuhanov could not lead his questioners to Maskhadov because he had last seen him in 2000 and subsequently had contact with him only on audiocassettes. When necessary, Maskhadov would record one and send it to Hasuhanov by courier. Occasionally Hasuhanov would reply. One of the couriers had become an FSB informer. The last time before his arrest that Hasuhanov had received a cassette was in January 2002, and he had replied two days earlier. On the tapes, Maskhadov usually asked Hasuhanov, apparently for the record, to confirm how much money he, Maskhadov, had transferred to which field commanders. We shall see why Maskhadov was interested in this subject.
Let us turn to the submarine. Its story deserves to be told in some detail. As noted earlier, Hasuhanov had been a high-ranking submarine officer before retiring. He was the only Chechen who ever became an officer in the nuclear submarine fleet, in either Soviet or post-Soviet times. Accordingly, Lieutenant Colonel Cherepnev set about trying to incriminate him in the “planning of an IAF to hijack a nuclear submarine, gain possession of a nuclear warhead, seize Deputies of the State Duma as hostages, demand changes to the constitutional system of the Russian Federation by threatening to use a nuclear warhead and to kill hostages.” This is a quotation from a form returned by Cherepnev to the public prosecutor’s office in Chechnya with a request for permission to continue the detention of Hasuhanov. The request was not refused.
Cherepnev did his utmost to incriminate Hasuhanov, but the results were unspectacular. Hasuhanov would not, and indeed could not, give in. In 1992 he himself had “built,” as they say in the navy, the very submarine Cherepnev was accusing him of planning to hijack. Hasuhanov had monitored the submarine’s construction, knowing that he would be serving on it. Thus he had supervised the project on behalf of its future crew.
Cherepnev worked hard on the story of the submarine hijacking. The FSB forged documents supposedly written by Chechen fighters on the basis of intelligence supplied by Hasuhanov. There was a “Working Plan of Chechen IAFs for carrying out an act of sabotage on the territory of the Russian Federation and hand-drawn maps of the bases of 4 Nuclear Submarine Flotilla of the Pacific Fleet” and a “Plan for conducting a terrorist act on the territory of Russia.” There was a helpful note added to the effect that “detailed planning of the operation was carried out on the basis of visual and reconnaissance intelligence of the region of interest to us during December 1995.” It was under these words that Hasuhanov was meant to place his signature.
The trouble was, the authorities could not get him to sign. The FSB set about beating him more ingeniously, although there was little they hadn’t already tried. Now, however, they were punishing him for disrupting their plans.
The only things Cherepnev ever got Hasuhanov to sign (“endorse” was the term used in the verdict), out of his mind from a combination of pain and psychotropic drugs, were blank sheets of “orders and operational instructions of Maskhadov.” Cherepnev wrote in whatever it seemed would go down well. Here is an example of one such fabrication:
3
Aslan Maskhadov was the leader of the Chechen resistance forces in the current Chechen war. In 1997 he was elected president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, his legitimacy recognized both by the Kremlin and by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which sent observers to the elections. In 1999, however, Putin declared Maskhadov to be de facto deposed. Maskhadov responded by heading up the resistance to the occupation of Chechnya by federal troops. He remained on Russia’s most-wanted list and was assassinated in March 2005.
Islam Hasuhanov is married to Maskhadov’s niece. He was renowned in Russia as a submarine officer, having served on one of the navy’s elite missile cruisers. On completing his service contract, he was honorably discharged and worked for the Ministry of Defense of Chechnya during the period when Maskhadov was internationally recognized as the legitimate president. The situation did not save Hasuhanov from being sentenced to twelve years in prison—in effect, for working for Maskhadov. As the Supreme Court of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alaniya acknowledged, testimony against Maskhadov was extorted from Hasuhanov during the preliminary investigation by means of barbaric treatment. The record of these court sessions, containing the admission that torture had been used, was subsequently passed to Amnesty International, which continues to work on the case.