Komsomolskoye massacre

A prominent feature in the incident was the fate of a group of about 72 Chechen combatants who had surrendered on 20 March on a Russian public promise of amnesty, but had almost all either died or "disappeared" shortly after they were detained.

'"[2] The United States Army Infantry School wrote that "the Ministry of Emergency Situations workers, who were tasked with removing civilian corpses and taking them to the nearby village of Goyskoye for identification (...) collected bodies lying by the river, some of which had ears, noses, or fingers sliced off.

[3] Speaking to a leading Russian human rights group Memorial in 2003, Rustam Azizov, a surviving Chechen captive whose arm had to be later amputated due to lack of medical treatment, described suffering extreme abuse while incarcerated, which included severe beatings and torture after being taken to a "filtration camp" at Urus Martan.

He also claimed to have witnessed injured Chechens being "crushed by tank caterpillars, smashed to death by rifle butts and even [trench] digging tools" and how "basements whereto we took our wounded with cut-off limbs were targeted by grenades or set ablaze",[4] a mass killing of prisoners who had surrendered in response to the Russian President's Vladimir Putin's public offer of amnesty on 20 March[5] as well as seeing the "disappeared" prisoners being forced to dig their own graves.

[4] In 2008, Prague Watchdog cited a testimony of the survivor "Aslan" speaking of prisoners being "beaten to death, buried alive in the ground, crushed by tanks and armored vehicles".

In it, a grainy black-and-white footage shows a large group of naked and half-naked Chechen prisoners who had accepted the Russian offer of amnesty, most of them injured; the captives shown are mostly men and adolescent boys, many of them having visible untreated wounds and some with missing limbs.

[8] Citing testimonies of Chechen witnesses, Politkovskaya alleged that those prisoners who were still alive were then sent to the notorious Chernokozovo detention center, a so-called "filtration camp", where many of them were tortured and killed by guards, and then buried by other inmates.