A Russian human rights group has reported that police from the republic of Ingushetia have discovered a mass grave on the border with neighboring Chechnya containing the bodies of 15 people who had been arrested by Russian troops.
The human rights group, Memorial, said the bodies were discovered on Friday at a location that had been earlier controlled by Russian troops.
It said seven of the bodies had been identified and all were Chechen men who had been arrested by Russian forces in Chechnya this spring.
Memorial said relatives of the victims had been tipped off about the mass grave after paying the Russian military large sums of money. They then contacted police in Ingushetia who uncovered the burial site.
The report was confirmed by the press service for separatist Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, which released the same seven names of the Chechens identified by Memorial.
Some of the bodies had plastic bags wrapped over their heads and showed signs of "violent death", according to Maskhadov's statement.
Maskhadov's office said the 15 were arrested during so-called "mopping up" operations by Russian troops in northwestern Chechnya in mid-May but Memorial said the arrests began two weeks earlier.
Chechen and Russian civil liberties defenders had held talks in June with federal army commanders in the war-torn republic and the Russian presidency's human rights ombudsman for the region in a bid to obtain the detainees' release, Memorial said.
At the meeting, the military chiefs and prosecutors "promised to establish the facts surrounding the detentions and start inquiries. But nothing happened after this promise", the group said.
Maskhadov's office appealed to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to look into the incident.
The discovery of the mass grave happened just after a parliamentary delegation from the Council of Europe rights and democracy body toured Chechnya to investigate reports of human rights abuses.
In March last year, Memorial presented evidence it said proved Russian troops had tortured dozens of Chechens before executing them and throwing them into a mass grave.
The Kremlin press office responsible for affairs in Chechnya was not initially available for comment on the report.
AFP