MOSCOW: Russian soldiers beat, robbed and tortured civilians in the Chechen village of Tsotsin-Yurt in a four-day spree of lawlessness over the New Year’s holiday that left at least three villagers dead, according to a new report by Memorial, Russia’s leading human rights group. Six other villagers arrested by the Russian troops are missing, according to the report, which was made public on Tuesday.

The events in the Chechen village constitute the latest allegations of crimes committed by Russian soldiers sent to the southern region to fight separatist rebels. As of last April, Russian prosecutors had opened 358 investigations into alleged human rights violations committed against Chechen civilians, according to Human Rights Watch, a New York-based organization that monitors Chechnya. Only about one-fifth of those cases are being actively investigated, and very few have resulted in charges against soldiers, according to the group.

The Memorial report portrays the operation as an ad hoc effort, less effective than the Russians claim and fraught with a “mass violation of human rights.” But Memorial found no evidence that dozens of civilians died, as was reported earlier by Glasnost-Media, an offshoot of the Glasnost Foundation, a Western-financed media watchdog group.

The operation started early on Dec 30 when soldiers arrested a man on the outskirts of the village. They threatened to push his distraught mother into the cellar and throw a grenade in after her, according to the report. Soldiers later used that man and his neighbour as human shields as they approached a house where three Chechen militants were hiding, the report says. The two men survived the gunfight between the fighters and the soldiers, but villagers later found their corpses not far from the soldiers’ temporary headquarters.

More than 100 Chechen civilians were detained, and many were beaten, according to the report. Soldiers put plastic bags over the heads of some villagers in an attempt to make them confess they were rebels. One villager said he asked the soldiers why they were beating civilians. They answered, “Because you are Chechens,” according to the report.

Villagers said that the soldiers robbed them of cars, tools, jewellry, clothes, chickens and money. Soldiers came into a house, threw a legless woman out of her wheelchair and refused to give the chair back until she paid them $333, all her savings. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.