Abubakar Yangulbayev

Chechen opposition activist.

Brothers Ibragim and Abubakar Yangulbayev and their father, retired judge Saidi Yangulbayev, were tortured in Chechnya in 2015. In 2017, Ibrahim was sent to a pre-trial detention centre in a case of incitement to hatred and hostility (part 1 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code) against "the Russian soldiers" and was released in early 2019 after the partial decriminalisation of this article. In late 2021, Abubakar Yangulbayev's flat in Pyatigorsk was searched, after which he was interrogated by police officers. Then his relatives in Chechnya were kidnapped: they were later released, but on 19 January at least two people were still kidnapped.

The mother of the Yangulbaev brothers, Zarema Musaeva, was forcibly taken from Nizhny Novgorod to Chechnya in January 2022, allegedly for interrogation in a fraud case (Article 159 of the Criminal Code). Since then, she was in a pre-trial detention centre as a suspect in the article on the use of violence against a police officer (part 2 of Article 318 of the Criminal Code). Her defence repeatedly pointed to the fabrication of evidence in the case. In July 2023, she was sentenced to five and a half years in a general regime penal colony.

The case against Abubakar was initiated in the summer of 2023. First, it became known about the charges of organising extremist activity, then - the justification of terrorism. In August, he was put on the federal wanted list and entered into the register of Rosfinmonitoring.