From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 4/5/2006 8:57 AM
What made Chechen schoolchildren ill?
As Russian sources reported on March 27, a mass outbreak of an unknown illness occurred in Chechnya's Shelkovskoi district in the middle of last December. The first registered cases appeared between December 7 and 19 among the students and staff of a middle school in the village of Starogladkovskaya. In all, 19 schoolchildren and three adults fell ill. The website of the Gazeta newspaper, Gzt.ru, reported on March 27 that the school children were diagnosed with poisoning. According to the website, a total of 87 people from the villages of Shelkovskaya, Shelkozavodskaya and Starogladovskaya were registered with symptoms that included suffocation, convulsions and "hysterical reactions." Shelkovskoi district head Khusein Nutaev claimed at the time that the cause of the illness was poisoning by a nerve or psychotropic gas.
Sultan Alimkhadzhiev, chief of the Chechen Republican Children's Hospital, told the Strana.ru website on December 20 that that all the victims "had the temporary diagnosis of poisoning by an unknown toxin."
The December incidents were in fact not the first reported outbreaks of apparent mass poisoning in the Shelkovskoi district last year. As Prague Watchdog reported last December, on September 13, 2005, 18 schoolchildren from the village of Staroshchedrinskaya were hospitalized with signs of poisoning and another eight from the same school were hospitalized on October 24.
The Chechen Kavkazcenter website ran a commentary last September 28 by Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Health Minister Umar Khanbiev that stated: "News that in Chechnya's Shelkovskoi district a large number of schoolchildren were poisoned by unknown military poison substances (presumably nerve gas) is unlikely to horrify the world. I am sure that if they all suddenly die (Allah forbid), the world will be silent and act as if it understood and noticed nothing."
Khanbiev wrote that while it was difficult for him to judge exactly what had taken place at the school in the village of Staroshchedrinskaya, the symptoms described by doctors there were reminiscent of those caused by chemical attacks that, Khanbiev alleged, had taken place during July 27-August 1, 2000 in three Chechen villages. Khanbiev also charged that Russia forces had used biological weapons in ChechnyaвЂ"specifically, bombs and shells containing botulinim toxin.
In an appeal published by the Kavkazcenter website last December 23, Khanbiev called on the World Health Organization, United Nations and other international organizations to "take the fate of the affected Chechen children under special control" and bring in an "independent medical commission" to examine the children, given that "the Russian Health Ministry and the Chechen puppet public health structures are direct participants in the genocide of the Chechen people and are interested in the covering up the crimes against humanity committed by the Kremlin regime on the Chechen soil."
NEW KADYROVITE CRIMES REPORTED
The Chechen National Salvation Committee reported on March 24 that two Chechen teenagers were detained by members of the local Anti- Terrorist Center and tortured. The committee cited a source who said that Bekkhan Makhmatkhadzhiev, 19, and Nurdi Bamataliev, 13, were detained on the outskirts of the Shali district village of Avtury on March 14, where they had driven to collect firewood. According to a source, the Anti-Terrorist Center personnel presented themselves to the boys as rebels and demanded food. When their demand was fulfilled, they detained, beat and tortured the boys for having assisted the rebels. The boys' parents managed with great effort to get them freed, the committee reported.
Meanwhile, Kavkazcenter reported on March 25 that video recordings made by a mobile phone show men believed to be members of security units loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov beating up a girl who called them traitors and beating up a young man to force him to admit that weapons found in a house belong to him. The video of the boy shows him being beaten more severely each time he denies owning the weapons, the separatist website reported. Other reported mobile phone videos allegedly show security forces loyal to Kadyrov beating to death a Russian serviceman and stuffing several men into the trunk of a car, while another allegedly shows Ramzan Kadyrov and some of his associates in a sauna with prostitutes
Sources: CHECHNYA WEEKLY
2006-04-05 18:11:15
http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2006/04/05/4577.shtml
