Komsomolskoye massacre allegedly occurred following the Battle of Komsomolskoye during the Second Chechen War in March 2000, when a large number of captured Chechen separatist fighters were extremely mistreated, resulting in deaths of many or even most of them. Prominent in the incident was fate of the group of about 74 Chechen combatants who had surrendered on March 21, 2000 on the federal promise of amnesty, but almost all had either died or "disappeared" shortly after they were detained.
In an unrelated incident, a small group of Russian prisoners of war had been also previously executed near the village in 1996.
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According to a Newsweek correspondent Owen Matthews who visited the ruins of Komsomolskoye soon after end of the fighting there, "it is clear that many [Chechens] did not die in battle. At least one had his hands bound with heavy cable and his head was split open with a spade; another had his tongue cut out. Three others had their ears cut off".[1]
Frastic prisoner abuse (severe beatings and complete lack of medical aid for the wounded resulting in deaths), as well as random murders and even extremely cruel executions of wounded Chechen fighters (beating to death, burning alive and crushing with tank caterpillars), including a mass killing on March 20 of prisoners who had responded to Vladimir Putin's proposal of amnesty[2] and were subsequently betrayed and mostly brutally exterminated, were also alleged by a surviving Chechen captive Rustam Azizov (whose arm had to be amputated due to torture) speaking to the leading Russian human rights group Memorial in 2003.[3]
An amateur video footage, dated March 21, 2000, and released four years later in 2004 by Anna Politkovskaya, crusading Russian investigative journalist for Novaya Gazeta, shows the naked and half-naked Chechen prisoners who accepted a federal offer of amnesty, most of them injured. The captives shown are mostly men and adolescent boys, many of them with untreated wounds and some missing limbs. While moving from one crowded prison truck to another, they are abused by the Ministry of Justice spetsnaz troops. Two women, who unlike the men did not show signs of beating, are separated and led away. At the end of the tape, some captives are ordered to unload comrades who had already died during transport. The naked corpses are dragged from the truck and heaped next to the railway tracks. According to Politkovskaya, making the video public was the idea of a Russian junior officer who made it, hoping it would help free him from "a nightmare which continues to torture him." For her, this video recalled "only one image: movies from the Nazi concentration camps". Quoting Chechen witnesses, Politkovskaya alleged the still-living prisoners were then sent to the notorious Chernokozovo filtration camp, where many of them were then tortured and killed by guards and then buried by other inmates. Three families of the missing said that they recognized their men among those shown on the video and it is believed the video shows them only shortly before they were killed. Of the three survivors known to Politkovskaya, two later committed suicide and one has disappeared.[4][5]
Executions of Russian prisoners of war had taken place before near Komsomolskoye on April 12, 1996, during the First Chechen War, when four captured Russian kontraktniki (contract servicemen) were sentenced to death and three of them were executed by being shot in the head from a pistol while the fourth had his throat cut, in an event also caught on videotape. According to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, "when Russia invaded Chechnya for a second time in September 1999, the video-tape became a powerful weapon in the Kremlin's propaganda war. It was shown to human rights organisations across Europe as well as to soldiers preparing for active service in the war-torn republic."[6]
Chechen field commander Salautdin Temirbulatov (known as Traktorist - 'tractor driver'), captured in March 2000 in the village of Duba-Yurt while forcing local residents to provide food and shelter for wounded rebel fighters, was accused of murder and tried in a Russian court in 2001. According to the prosecution, he subsequently confessed to the 1996 execution and showed where the bodies had been buried.[7]