Russian authorities have charged Zarema Musaeva, the 55-year-old mother of three popular Chechen opposition activists, with assaulting a prison guard.

The Crew Against Torture, a local rights group, told OC Media that Musaeva was charged with disorganising the activities of a prison colony on 13 December, after allegedly hitting a prison guard and tearing his epaulettes, which she denies doing.

The incident allegedly took place as she was being transported back to the prison colony from the hospital where she was receiving treatment.

Musaeva is already serving a sentence on charges of assaulting a law enforcement officer. Her sentence was to end in March 2025, but if found guilty of the new charges, she could face five more years in prison.

She was initially detained in January 2022, after she was kidnapped from her flat in Nizhny Novgorod by Chechen security forces. They initially wanted to detain her husband, Saidi Yangulbaev, a former Federal Judge of the Chechen Republic, but were unable to due to his judicial immunity.

Once transferred to Grozny after her detention, she was sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest for allegedly insulting a police officer, and was then charged with assaulting a police officer and fraud.

Human rights activists consider Musaeva to be a political prisoner of Chechen Head Ramzan Kadyrov, because of the activities of her sons, the three Yangulbaev brothers, who run the opposition 1ADAT Telegram channel from outside of Russia.

This new charge came two days after one of her sons criticised Kadyrov, a representative of the Crew Against Torture told OC Media.

‘On 27 October, one of Zarema’s sons wrote a post in his Telegram channel criticising Ramzan Kadyrov. A couple of days later, investigators came to Zarema with a new criminal case. Earlier we drew attention to the fact that the attitude towards Zarema, as well as the conditions of her detention, changed for the worse depending on the activity of her sons on the internet’, said the organisation’s representative.

‘Zarema Musaeva is completely at the mercy of the Chechen authorities. We can expect anything.’

The Crew Against Torture appealed to the UN’s Human Rights Rapporteur in Russia to submit an enquiry to the Russian authorities about Musaeva’s condition after learning of the new case against her in mid-November. They warned that Musaeva’s health was deteriorating, and that she could only move using crutches.

Abubakar Yangulbaev, Musaeva’s son, has also insisted that his mother is innocent, and that she had not committed any crime, ‘even of political activity against the current regime’.

‘I offered Kadyrov to exchange her for me, they didn’t agree to that either’, Yangulbaev told OC Media. ‘According to Caucasian, Chechen concepts, if anyone had even a milligram of masculine or human dignity, morality, or conscience left at all, they would refrain from the lowliness of persecuting an adult woman with a number of diseases.’

Yangulbaev said that Kadyrov’s authorities were using his mother as an example to frighten dissidents.

‘When pensioners and other dissidents are taken in for preventive talks, they are told: “Do you want the same thing that happened to the Yangulbaevs happen to you? Do you want your mother to be taken away?” ’, he said.

Kadyrov threatened the Yangulbaevs immediately after Musaeva’s abduction. High-ranking Chechen security forces and officials joined in the threats, and a rally against the Yangulbayev family was held in the centre of Grozny, where their portraits were burned, trampled on, and torn.

Last July, Musaeva was sentenced to five and a half years in a general regime prison colony; the sentence was later reduced by six months and she was transferred to low security prison. She was twice denied parole.

In May, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of Musaeva and ordered Russia to pay her €52,000 ($55,000) in compensation for her arrest.

Russia has refused to honour the court’s ruling.

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