Guerrilla phase (2000–2009) The Novye Aldi massacre was the mass murder of Chechen civilians on February 5, 2000, in which Russian forces went on a cleansing operation (zachistka), summarily executing dozens.
[3] The official investigation into the Aldi massacre established that the "sweep operation" there was conducted by the paramilitary police of OMON from the northern Russian city of Saint Petersburg (possibly also from the southern Ryazan Oblast).
At least five of them died during the barrage of February 3–4 which included cluster bomb air strikes (among them three members of the ethnic Russian Smirnov family killed when their house was hit in the last hours of the bombardment).
They had been fired on as they approached the federal military positions (one of them, an ethnic Russian, was injured in the shooting and later died), but eventually managed to successfully negotiate a cessation of the shelling.
The initial Russian forces who had arrived in Aldi in the afternoon of February 4 (visibly battle-weary and typically very young conscript soldiers in dirty uniforms), did not encounter any resistance and passed through the settlement without committing any illegal acts.
[4] According to the June 2000 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW),[5] based on reports of the fighting by the Russian human rights group Memorial (HRW has been denied direct access to Chechnya by the Russian authorities), the "mop-up" forces came in the morning of the next day (February 5) in multiple groups advancing from the northern edges towards the center of Aldi, likely numbering in excess of one hundred men along with several vehicles (BTR armoured personnel carriers, Ural trucks and UAZ minibuses).
Conscript soldiers, according to Human Rights Watch, distinguished themselves in a number of incidents, either warning residents of the imminent danger or saving the lives of civilians by their active intervention.
[4] After entering the settlement, ostensibly to check villagers' internal passports and to detain suspected fighters who had been left behind, groups of Russian riot police officers and contract soldiers began beating and randomly shooting civilians in their homes and in the streets.
Among other victims were an infant boy (one-year-old Khassan Estamirov, shot with at least two bullets to the head and then burned), at least six younger Chechen women (including the eight-months-pregnant 21-year-old Toita Estamirova, found with gunshot wounds to her stomach and chest), an elderly Russian woman (70-year-old Elena Kuznetsova, repeatedly shot in the face at point-blank range while leaving the cellar at 58 Second Tsimliansky Lane and then burned together with bodies of her Chechen neighbours, the Yakhiayevs) and a Ukrainian man (40-year-old Victor Shiptora, whose body was found in Khoperskaia Street).
There were many incidents of Russian forces deliberately starting fires through the village, systematically torching civilian homes and property using canisters and bottles of flammable liquid, in particular where they found people with no identity papers.
[4] At least five people were murdered on this day in the nearby neighborhood of Chernorechie, an adjacent Grozny suburb linked with Aldi by a road through the large reservoir dam to the west.
)[4] The initial Russian investigations, including one which established the operation was undertaken by OMON units from the city of St. Petersburg and Ryazan province, had been accompanied by indignant public denial.
[7] The residents expressed fear and mistrust of the Russian investigators in Aldi (three different teams on February 14 and 16 and on March 19), whose activities appeared to be an attempt to shift the blame on to the Chechen fighters and to intimidate the witnesses.
[4] In spite of the weight of evidence and a host of enquiries by foreign and Russian journalists and by human rights organisations, no official investigation of the crime has ever been completed.