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Petropavlovskaya - Tolstoi-Yurt road, October 29, 1999

On October 29, 1999, a civilian convoy was fired at on the road from Petropavlovskaya to Tolstoi-Yurt. About fifteen people died on the spot; many were seriously injured⁶⁵. Six children between the ages of five and seventeen miraculously escaped death in surrounding fields and were found alive four days later. Four days after the tragedy four burnt cars were buried beside the road with corpses of victims inside. This reportedly took place immediately before Russia’s then-Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Koshman was expected to drive by. Only on June 4, 1999 were the bodies dug out and relatives learned about the fate of their loved ones.

The convoy left Argun at 8:30 a.m. and passed by Petropavlovskaya where more cars joined it. Khabira Emieva, a fifty-three-year old Argun resident, explained to Human Rights Watch the precautions they took to protect the convoy from attack:

There were twenty-seven of us in the truck. I was in the cab with my two grandsons and the rest of the people were in the back of the truck. We even hung a white flag to let them know that we were peaceful civilians. All the cars had white flags. They were big, like the size of half a sheet.⁶⁶

At approximately 9:30 a.m. the convoy was fired upon as it began to go down a steep mountain slope leading down to Tolstoi-Yurt. An eleven-year-old boy told Human Rights Watch:

It was in the morning. [I saw] a woman who raised her arm as if to warn us [about the attack]. Something hit the road close to her. Then I could only see that half a human body fell to the ground. Another woman shouted: “A man was killed over there!” Then Aslanbek [father of the four children traveling in the same truck] jumped out from the back of the truck. I followed him. I couldn’t run. I just crawled up a hill and lay behind it.⁶⁷

Khabira Emieva, who lost her husband and two daughters that day, described the moment of the attack:

There were thirty-seven cars there... There was a white “Zhiguli” with a trailer ahead of us. When we started to move ... it was like the windshield smashed... I almost lost consciousness, my face was all bloody, I couldn’t see anything. I was sitting in the cab with my two grandsons. The one who was between [me and the driver] remained untouched. But the one sitting on my lap, he was covered in pieces [of glass]. His whole face is scared now. He is four years old. His arm was almost cut off. I jumped out of the cab and saw my husband running to me. He said: “Come on, lie down!” We lay down and stayed there for four and a half hours.⁶⁸

The reason for the attack remains unclear. Ruslan Shavkhalov, deputy head of the Health Department of [the then Russian controlled territory of] the Chechen Republic, said: “That was an ordinary military situation. A group of fighters was leaving Argun hiding behind the backs of women and children. This is their favorite trick. They were leaving the area to set up another stronghold in the liberated territory.”⁶⁹ Even if some rebels were in the convoy, this would not have justified the excessive risk to the many civilians whose presence was manifest. One witness said:

First, there were sheep and cows there. Second, you could see bags and beds in the cars. In the back of the KAMAZ truck there were women, kids and a there was a white flag on every car. There were no military cars in the convoy. You could easily see that it was a civilian convoy. There were no water or gas tanks.⁷⁰

The convoy was shelled by artillery, fired at by machine guns from helicopters and even by snipers. Khabira Emieva told Human Rights Watch: “[In the beginning it was] long-range artillery. After we were lying down snipers started to fire. And they also fired at us from machine guns on helicopters.”⁷¹ Vakha Banzhaev, who watched the scene from Petropavlovskaya, told Human Rights Watch what he saw:

The column was at a crossing. You could see planes coming down and - bang! Two planes - one of them was covering the second one from above, then they would change. It was like in the previous war. ... We saw planes and helicopters from Petropavlovskaya. There were two planes and a few helicopters. We didn’t see tanks because we were behind the mountain pass. There were four planes altogether: [The first] two left for Mozdok, [then the second] two came from the direction to Asrakhan.⁷²

Khabira Emieva lost her husband, Khasan Emiev, sixty, and two her daughters, Madina, twenty-nine and Malika, twenty-two. She told Human Rights Watch:

My two girls were killed at the very beginning [of the attack]. My husband crawled up to me and asked: “Leila - do you know what happened to the girls?”⁷³ I said: “No.” He said that he took the older one down from the truck and then he was wounded by a shrapnel. After that when he went to see the girls again he was killed by another shrapnel which passed right through his heart. Then an “Ural” truck came [to help us].⁷⁴

Lena Azdomirova, sixty-eight, mother of Maia Azdomirova, was seriously wounded and died in Severnoe several days later: “She had trauma to the skull and also internal trauma to the intestines and died of these contusions and a hemorrhage. She lost and regained consciousness in turns. I know that when [my relatives] demanded that the doctors issue the death certificate the doctors had written that [she died of] heart failure. I think that they were afraid to provide [a certificate with the genuine cause of death].”⁷⁵

Vakha Banzhaev, forty-two, drove alongside the convoy after the attack. He told Human Rights Watch:

It went on for three or four hours. There were many cars there, maybe twenty or thirty, maybe more. The convoy was really big. ... I saw bodies of people with no arms, no legs, intestines. It was painful to look at. I could hear cries of women, kids. Here and there you hear: “Help!” I did not have time to stop because the same fate might await my family [in the place where I left it]... Near a yellow bus I saw people with no heads. The bus was still burning. Behind the bus I saw a blue truck, a ZIL, which was still intact except for the smashed windows, and motor cars with trailers. There was also a KAMAZ, a big, heavily loaded truck. There were beds, children, women in the back of the truck. Everything has been shot at. I think the truck took a shell in the back: I am not sure. There were mattresses, chairs [on the road]. There were already some people there who had come to help.

“Adlan,” an eleven-year-old boy, crawled up a hill beside the road and hid there along with four other children: a four-year-old girl, ten-, eleven-, and seventeen-year-old boys, another older boy, and Umani, a twenty-year-old woman with wounds to her head and arm.

I stood up and saw my brother and my grandfather coming. Then I looked at them again - they were not there. It was like a nightmare. We waited, waited, then crawled further up. We were fired at by snipers, then by tanks. Then we sat down and [after a while the shelling] stopped. The four-year-old girl was weeping. Someone else cried: “Where is my mother?”.

Then we saw a “Ural” truck coming up [to the convoy]. We thought it was Russian. But then we saw the older boy’s father [beside the truck]. The boy ran to him. He jumped on the moving car and the men in the back of the truck caught him. Some people were left on the road - some of them alive, some dead.⁷⁶

The remaining children roamed the surrounding hills for four days. They saw Russian APC’s visit the site of the attack. According to one boy: “On the second or third day [we saw] Russians in tanks coming in our direction, shelling. Then I looked - APC’s were dragging carpets wrapped in white cloth. They tied [the carpets] up. Then they collected gold, searched for something, checked plastic bags.”⁷⁷ On the fifth day the children were found by residents of Tolstoi-Yurt.

Four days later the four smashed cars with the remains of passengers were buried by the road. Khabira Emieva told Human Rights Watch:

We took the two bodies [Khabira’s husband Khasen Emiev and her older daughter Madina] to the hospital, but left [the body of] one girl [Malika] on the GAZ-53 truck. They said that Nikolai Koshman [head of the Russian appointed administration of Chechnya] would pass by [in four days] and they had to clear the road. They buried four cars along with my daughter and one girl - our neighbor.⁷⁸

The cars were dug out only on June 4:

I couldn’t find my daughter for seven months. After that we received permission [to dig out the cars]. I took her [Malika’s body] to Tolstoi-Yurt and buried her there near my husband and other daughter.⁷⁹

Maiya Azdomirova told Human Rights Watch the cars were unearthed on June 4, 2000: “Khabira Emieva’s son was there. Then they found our car and burnt belongings. Russian soldiers took everything that remained intact.”⁸⁰