Life in Putin's Russia

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washingtonpost.com - nation, world, technology and Washington area news and headlines

By Julia Latynina
Sunday, June 22, 2008; Page B01

MOSCOW On Nov. 9, 2007, during a special operation in the village of Chemulga, in the republic of Ingushetia, Russian special forces shot and killed an individual by the name of Rakhim Amriyev. Eyewitnesses said that they shot him in the head and placed an automatic rifle beside his body. Then, as dozens of villagers who had run out of their homes looked on, the troops used an armored personnel carrier to demolish a wall of the one-room house where Amriyev lived and announced that he had died in a shootout.

You may ask how I can be sure that things happened this way -- that Amriyev didn't fire back, that he wasn't a terrorist and that the automatic rifle was planted. I'm absolutely certain -- because Rakhim Amriyev was 6 years old. washingtonpost.com - nation, world, technology and Washington area news and headlines

So much for freedom in the former U.S.S.R.
This article is very revealing. And I applaud it's courageous and conscientious author.
Sadly, the above and the following excerpts are not the whole story. I urge you to read the rest of the article.

Crime in Russia is hardly being investigated. In May of last year, the body of 4-year-old Nastia Mokryakova, her throat slit, was found in the woods outside Moscow. What do you think the police told the news media? "The child got lost and died of exposure." A month later, in the Moscow suburb of Tomilino, some maniac strangled 10-year-old Nastia Butenkova, and the first thing the police did was to say that the girl, who'd been found on a staircase with her pants pulled down around her ankles, may have caused her own suffocation. (A public outcry ultimately led to an investigation of both murders.) washingtonpost.com - nation, world, technology and Washington area news and headlines