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Putin orders investigation of attack on journalists in North Caucasus

Xinhua, March 11, 2016 Adjust font size:

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday ordered the Interior Ministry to thoroughly investigate the attack on journalists and human rights activists in North Caucasus, according to the Kremlin.

"We expect that the republic's law enforcement bodies will take the most efficient measures to search for and find those guilty of the attack to duly ensure security of human rights activists and mass media representatives, as well as everybody else," Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"(The attack) is absolutely outrageous, absolutely hooliganism, and as far as we understand, the lives of these people were threatened, according to the available information, and this is completely unacceptable," RIA Novosti news agency quoted Peskov as saying.

Around 20 masked persons Wednesday attacked a bus which was carrying journalists and human rights activists in the Russian North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia at the border with another republic, Chechnya, the Russian president's Council for Development of Civil Society and Human Rights said Thursday.

The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned the attack, hoping that those guilty will be identified and brought to justice.

According to the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, which took part in the human rights activist trip, its members as well as Russian, Swedish and Norwegian journalists were thrown out of the vehicle and beaten with sticks, while their mobile phones were seized and the bus was set on fire.

"The committee is deeply convinced that the incident calls for a thorough and impartial investigation," according to the agency's letter sent to Russia's Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika.

Russian media said six people were injured in the attack and four of them hospitalized, including a Norwegian journalist and a Swedish reporter.

Earlier a staff member of the Russian hospital where the victims were being treated said they were in satisfactory condition.

The search operation is currently underway to find the persons who committed the attack, and a criminal case has been opened on charges of deliberate damage of property and hooliganism, the Interior Ministry of Ingushetia said in a statement.

This is not the first attack against activists of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture in North Caucasus. Unknown persons destroyed the committee's office in Grozny, Chechnya, in June 2015.

The Committee for the Prevention of Torture is an interregional non-governmental organization founded in 2000, as a human rights group with the purpose of exercising public control over the problem of torture application and violent treatment in Russia and granting professional legal and medical aid to torture victims.

The committee's head Igor Kalyapin has posted a video on the Internet, calling Wednesday's attack a "demonstrative act of intimidation." Endi