731. Chechnya Weekly: Russian Security Agency Report-Edly Targeting Widows
- Author:
- Lawrence Uzzell
- Publication Date:
- 04-2004
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
- Abstract:
- Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB; the renamed KGB) appears now to be using a new, stunningly self-defeating tactic to try to forestall possible terrorist attacks: kidnapping widows of Chechen men already killed by those same agencies. A handful of such widows have become suicide bombers, and the FSB is now seizing women for no reason other than that they are widows and therefore might, in theory, become terrorists in the future. According to an April 8 article by Julius Strauss of the London Daily Telegraph, the Russian human rights center Memorial has reported ten such kidnappings in January alone.
- Topic:
- Security and Ethnic Conflict
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Europe, and Asia