Magomed Aushev, Maysigov’s lawyer, told OC Media that the investigators failed to prove in court that there was a risk Maysigov would influence the course of the investigation if released from custody. They had asked the court to extend Maysigov’s pre-trial detention.
Maysigov managed Fortanga’s social media pages. Fortanga was set up in the wake of a controversial land deal between Ingushetia and Chechnya and covered the protests surrounding the deal extensively.
Protests in Magas on 4 October. Photo: Aznaur Tashayev /OC Media.
Aushev said that during Maysigov was tortured with electric shocks during his interrogation, but that no traces of torture were found on his body. After his arrest, Maysigov confessed that the drugs belonged to him.
According toEurasiaDaily, medical examiners that Maysigov was taken to after being detained found that he was intoxicated, that there were traces of cannabis in his blood, and traces of heroin on his hands.
After Maysigov was released into house arrest, Aushev told OC Media that later tests, while he was in pre-trial detention, showed that there were ‘no drugs in his body’.
Pressure on Fortanga
During his questioning by the FSB, Maysigov gave evidence against the founder and editor-in-chief of Fortanga, Isabella Yevloyeva.
According to a copy of the questioning protocols obtained by OC Media, Maysigov said that Yevloyeva had handed him leaflets of an ‘extremist nature’ calling for Ingushetia to secede from Russia and to join Georgia.
Such leaflets appeared overnight in Magas and Nazran, the capital and largest city of Ingushetia, in May.
The author of the leaflets was not disclosed and activists opposed to the land deal accused the authorities of disseminating them themselves, calling them a ‘provocation’.
Maysigov subsequently retracted these statements.
On 14 July, two days after Maysigov’s arrest, Fortanga’s website was blocked in Russia. According to Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications regulator, the site contained ‘material that is included on the Federal List of Extremist Materials’, that was added to the list by the Bataysk City Court of the Rostov Region in 2013.
Shortly before Maysigov’s arrest, Yevloyeva stepped away from her duties as editor of Fortanga citing threats against her family. After relocating them to Europe in October, she resumed her duties.
Yevloyeva told OC Media that ‘Rashid’s detention, as well as his arrest, were a complete surprise’.
Commenting on Maysigov’s transfer to house arrest, Yevloyeva said that she ‘would like the same decision to be made with respect to political prisoners in the case of the riots in Magas, if not out of legitimacy, then at least out of the principles of humanity’.
A Controversial Land Deal
More than 30 participants of protests in Magas on 27 March are currently being held in pre-trial detention centres in Nalchik and Vladikavkaz. They are accused of making calls for riots and violence against government officials. Their lawyers have requested their transfer to house arrest.
Many well-known public figures in Ingushetia and Russia made sureties for some of those arrested, but the courts have so far declined to satisfy the defence’s requests.
The case has become known as the ‘Ingush Bolotnaya Case’, after the prosecutions of protesters from a large demonstration in 2012 on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square.
The main demands of the protesters in Ingushetia was the resignation of then–head of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, and the cancellation of the border agreement with Chechnya signed on 26 September 2018.
Under the widely unpopular deal signed by Yevkurov and his Chechen counterpart Ramzan Kadyrov, Ingushetia handed around 340 square kilometres (9% of its territory) to Chechnya.
‘Usual practice’
Maysigov was held in the Karabulak pre-trial detention centre in Ingushetia for more than 4 months.
‘Lawyers constantly appealed against his arrest, but the appeals were not satisfied. Our position was reasonable and legal. I don’t know what influenced it, but they complied with the law’, Aushev said.
Ruslan Mutsolgov, a lawyer and head of the Ingish branch of liberal opposition party Yabloko, said that Maysigov’s case was similar to that of other ‘political prisoners’.
‘The drug-planting business has been operating in our country for many, many years. This is a common practice in Russia’, Mutsolgov told OC Media.
Journalists and government critics have frequently been prosecuted in Russia, especially in the North Caucasus, in cases rights groups insist are fabricated.
Others similar prosecutions in recent years include those of Martin Kochesoko, the leader of Circassian youth group Khabze,Oyub Titiyev, the head of Russian rights group Memorial’s Chechen branch, Zhalavdi Geriyev, a Chechen journalist who reported on rights abuses in the Caucasus, and Nikolay Yarst, a Sochi-based investigative reporter.
Circassian activist Martin Kochesoko was released on bail awaiting trial on drug charges.
Mutsolgov said that Maysigov’s transfer to house arrest was unlikely to be a sign of the government softening its approach to activists.
‘Perhaps this is due to the materials of the case and the inability to keep Maysigov isolated from society’, he said.
Mutsolgov said that he would like to hope that Maysigov’s transfer to house arrest ‘will bring the whole case to a legal framework, the court will take into account the objective situation and appoint him a fair sentence’.
Nevertheless, he added that Maysigov being placed under house arrest instead of released on bail showed that ‘there will be a guilty verdict’, although ‘somewhere deep down, I really hope for an acquittal’.
The Russian Government has claimed that the Ingush authorities have signed off on the transfer of parts of the Erzi Nature Reserve to Chechnya as part of the 2018 land swap between the two republics — an allegation denied the very next day by Ingushetia’s vice-premier.
The Russian Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology, Alexander Kozlov, made the comments in a meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov, the Head of Chechnya, on 13 June. He said that part of the Erzi Nature Reserve was to be transferred to
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has blocked the accounts of Fortanga, the largest Ingush news site, allegedly for trademark infringement.
Izabella Evloeva, editor-in-chief of Fortanga, told OC Media that they had managed to recover their Instagram account and Facebook group on Thursday morning, however, their Facebook page remains unavailable.
Immediately after losing the accounts, the outlet’s editor-in-chief also began receiving threats and attempts to extort money fro
Ingush activist and journalist Rashid Maysigov has been sentenced to three years in a penal colony for ‘drug possession’.
On Wednesday, the Magas District Court in Ingushetia sentenced him for the ‘possession of a large quantity of drugs’. The prosecutor’s office had demanded five years in prison for Maysigov.
A former journalist for local opposition news outlet Fortanga, Maysigov covered the Chechen–Ingush land swap dispute.
The authorities in Russia, and especially in the North Caucasus
One year ago today, a clash between protesters and security forces in Magas, the capital of Ingushetia, marked the beginning of some of the worst persecutions of activists in Ingushetia since the collapse of the USSR.
‘On the morning of the 27th, we were dozing’, Tamerlan (not his real name) recalled. ‘When we heard the noise of heavy vehicles’.
The noise they heard was the national guard, moving in on their position in armored trucks.
The protesters had been gathered since the day before
