100 gay men were sent to prison camps in Chechnya

Reports everywhere are saying that gay men are being held in camps in the Chechen Republic, where they are being tortured and beaten.

At least 100 gay men had been rounded up and imprisoned in Chechnya, some have been killed.

The Independent wrote:

Some detainees told Novaya Gazeta they were tortured and electrocuted while they were imprisoned, and others described seeing prisoners beaten to death.

“You cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic,” he told the Interfax news agency.

“If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning.”

However, victims told the paper they were beaten with sticks, forced to sit on bottles and had their hands electrocuted. 

One said he had been kept near a building where the authorities were holding suspected militants who had fought in Syria or those suspected of being in touch with jihadi fighters.

“Several times a day we were taken out and beaten,” he said. “Their main aim was to find out your circle of contacts — in their minds if you are a suspect then your circle of contacts are all gay. They kept our phones switched on. Any man who calls or texts is a new target."

The detainee also described being beaten with a plastic pipe: “They always hit us below the waist — on the thighs, the buttocks, the loins. They said we were dogs who had no right to life.”

Another victim described how one man was arrested for possession of drugs when police found pornography on his phone and used his contacts list to find other homosexuals.