The recent campaign against homosexual in Chechnya has led authorities to detain 100 gay men, and also 3 men killed in the anti-gay campaign.
The recent crackdown on homosexuals had led police in arresting local television authorities and religious figures who are gays. The report has since been denied by Alvi Karimov, Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov spokesperson.
Alvi while speaking to Interfax news agency,claims the recent information is "absolute lies and disinformation" and claims that “You cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic,” Alvi said that there are no gay people in Chechnya. He added;
If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning.
Russia project director for the International Crisis Group, Ekaterina Sokirianskaia while speaking to the Guardian said that the report is true, and she has received information about the issue from different sources in the past 10 days. She said that authorities have denied the incident, and instead information has been coming in from second hand or third hand sources, she said;
I have heard about it happening in Grozny [the Chechen capital], outside Grozny, and among people of very different ages and professions. It’s next to impossible to get information from the victims or their families, but the number of signals I’m receiving from different people makes it hard not to believe detentions and violence are indeed happening.
The Chechnya community is a strictly conservative region, so unlike other cases where gay families or activist put pressure on government when gays go missing, those suspected to be homosexual are disowned by their own families. If the community get to know there is a gay member in a family, other member of that family will find it extremely difficult to get married due to "shame."
A St Petersburg LGBT centre has set up an anonymous hotline for gay people living in Chechnya to help them evacuate from the Republic.