Armed thugs beat up Russian journalist and lawyer
Prominent investigative journalist Yelena Milashina has been badly beaten and had fingers broken by masked men as she travelled to a court in the Russian republic of Chechnya, colleagues say.
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Ms Milashina has received death threats in the past from Chechnya's notorious leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.
She was travelling with a lawyer, Alexander Nemov, who was also attacked.
They had just arrived at the airport to attend a court verdict for a mother of three exiled Kadyrov critics.
Their car was stopped as they drove to the capital, Grozny, where Zarema Musayeva was later given a five-and-a-half-year jail term. She was detained by Chechen security forces in January 2022 in her flat in western Russia, on charges condemned as politically motivated.
Alexander Nemov described how the pair had been ambushed by a group of 10-12 men 200m from Grozny airport.
"It was a classic kidnapping," Yelena Milashina told a Chechen human rights official in hospital in Grozny. "They pinned down then threw our driver out of his car, climbed in, bent our heads down, tied my hands, forced me to my knees and put a gun to my head."
Her employer, Novaya Gazeta newspaper, said she had suffered an internal brain injury and had fingers broken. She also had her head shaved and her face doused in green dye.
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"They threw us on the side of the road and started kicking us in the face, all over the body... they stabbed me in the leg," Mr Nemov was quoted as telling the Russian bar association.
Rights group Crew against Torture posted an image showing his knife wound. The group's head Sergei Babinets said the pair had been beaten with hard plastic pipes.
The Kremlin said it was a very serious attack that had to be investigated. But Memorial, a human rights group banned by Russia, said there was no doubt that the Moscow and Grozny authorities were "united in their actions". It said three of the journalist's fingers had been broken.
The two victims were later take to hospital in the neighbouring region of North Ossetia.
Her investigative reporting detailing human rights abuses in Chechnya followed in the footsteps of two women who were murdered for their own brave work. In 2006 Novaya Gazeta colleague Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow, while her friend and campaigner Natalia Estemirova was abducted and shot in Grozny.