“They attach pegs to your hands or other parts of your body”
As more news comes out of the gay purge currently happening in Chechnya, a former detainee who was rounded up by Chechen forces shared his story with Vice.
His name is “David” and he detailed what he witnessed and experienced as part of being held prisoner.
It's nothing less than horrifying.
Here are some highlights from the Vice story. warning – it is graphic and very disturbing.
On what they did to him and others:
“They used electricity to torture. It is very painful when they attach pegs to your hands or other parts of your body, and they start spinning this machine with a handle that starts producing electricity. For many people, the tips of their fingers were bursting because the electricity was coming out of the bodies that way.
Later they made us beat each other up one by one. They put us on the floor and each of us had to take a pipe in our hands and hit three times the one that was laying on the floor. If you make a simple calculation, it is 100–150 hits per person.
The skin was just bursting and we were bleeding. They wouldn’t let us bleed. In time people smelt dreadfully of rotten meat. When the wounds started to rot, they put bags on us, they put bags on our heads.
And so every day we lived with this idea that if not today then tomorrow they will kill us and bury us somewhere.”
“What questions were they asking — what did they try to find out?
“As a rule: ‘Give us the names, tell us who your friends are’ They would open your phone in front of you and would go into your WhatsApp messages, for example, and when there was nothing to pick on, they would just open avatars of this or that person who you were in contact with, no matter whether it was your relative, friend, or colleague and asked you, ‘And is this one same as you?’
You respond ‘no’ and they start torturing you. ‘Tell us. You will tell us anyway. Tell us.’
In order to avoid the torture, some people were giving affirmative answers to just be left alone. There was a case when one person that wasn’t part of LGBT admitted he was gay because he was made to. They beat him up until he admitted ‘Yes, I am like this’. And when he said ‘I am like this’, this pressure from him was relieved. But eventually they beat him up anyway.”
How long were you kept there for?
“We were kept there for nearly two weeks — then they let us go.”
Read our post on how you can help LGBT people get out of Chechnya and help stop the purge.
