[2] According to the Russian human rights group Memorial, "by the most modest estimations", the overall number of those having passed through the established and ad hoc "filtration points" reaches at least 200,000 people (out of Chechnya's population of less than one million), of whom "practically all" were subjected to beatings and torture, and some were summarily executed.
In some cases, the male population of a village was rounded up, taken to an empty field, and subjected to beatings while Russian officials looked for suspected rebels.
Chernokozovo was subject of a significant attention in 2000, as well as at least two illegal detention and torture related rulings by the European Court of Human Rights (the cases of the Chitayev brothers in 2007 and of Zura Bitiyeva in 2008, the latter also including the subsequent summary execution of her and her family).
[5] According to Memorial, other long-term "filtration points" run by federal forces included the notorious "Titanic" facility located between Aleroy and Tsentoroy, the site of a "disappearance" of many people.
In addition, temporary "filtration camps" were set up in the open fields or in abandoned premises on the outskirts of the towns and villages in the course of numerous "mopping-up" (zachistka) special operations.
[2] In 2006, Russia's human rights groups produced a documentary evidence of a secret torture center in the basement of a former school for deaf children in Oktyabrsokye district of Grozny, which they alleged had been used by a unit of the Russian special police OMON that had been stationed nearby during the early 2000s to hold, torture and kill hundreds of people, whose bodies were then dumped throughout Chechnya.
A member of the unit, Sergei Lapin was convicted in 2005 of torturing Chechen student Zelimkhan Murdalov, one of the "disappeared" who remains unaccounted for[6]).