A Med Student Who Had a Pen Shoved Into His Brain Is One of Russia’s Latest War on Terror Targets

A 22-year-old medical student from Russia's predominantly Muslim republic of Dagestan has been accused of recruiting men to fight for an Islamic State-linked group in Syria — but he may never be able to tell his own side of the story, because a pen was jammed through his eye and into his brain while in custody.

Authorities say Magomed Aliyev's injury was self-inflicted, but his family has said that this claim is a desperate attempt by investigators to sweep their own overzealous behavior under the rug.

"It took the doctors nearly six hours to pull that pen out of his brain — it went all the way through. That's how much force went into it. They were barely able to extract it," said Aminat Aliyeva, the young man's sister, who was with her brother when agents from the Federal Security Service detained him in Moscow.

She told VICE News that the detention itself was like something out of a B-rate detective flick: a group of six plainclothes men descended on the pair in broad daylight on November 21 before beating Aliyev, bundling him into a car, and driving off.

The men identified themselves as police only minutes into the incident, she said, and offered no identification documents or warrants.

For days after the incident Aliyev was missing, with lawyers unable to figure out which detention facility he was being held in and which branch of the Federal Security Service was responsible for him.

Shortly after he was discovered to be in a Stavropol detention facility — nearly 900 miles from Moscow — he was checked into a hospital with severe brain injuries after the pen had been shoved through his eye.

The Federal Prison Service, which was responsible for Aliyev's stay in the pre-trial detention center, has issued a statement saying the suspect "inflicted harm to himself of his own accord."

"This fact was recorded on surveillance cameras set up in the man's cell," Svetlana Klinchayeva, head of the agency's press service, said in comments to Caucasian Knot after the incident.

Aliyev's relatives are demanding that authorities release the videotape, and the Federal Security Service says it opened a check into the incident, but his family is not holding their breath.

"If they haven't already shown us this video, especially with all this media attention, it means they're hiding something and they're probably not going to," Aminat said.

"Even if he did it himself, let's say he did, theoretically, since that's what they keep insisting — what would they have been doing to him to force him to that point?" she said.

Chechnya's Islamist Insurgency Rears Its Head Once Again in Deadly Grozny Gunfight. Read more here.

In a country where an estimated 15 percent of the population is Muslim, Aliyev's case has many wondering how wide the security services have cast the net in their war on terror.

Russia's security services have battled a simmering Islamic insurgency in Chechnya, Dagestan, and other parts of the North Caucasus for decades, seeking to put down the militants still seeking revenge for the Chechen wars of the 1990s-2000s. The fact that hundreds of men from the North Caucasus have joined the Syrian civil war has only intensified authorities' fears of them returning to Russian soil.

Aminat said the accusations against her brother are based on flimsy evidence — that he knew people who'd gone to Syria — which is not uncommon in Russia's North Caucasus.

"They have suspicions that he recruited some guys to go to Syria, but they don't even know for sure that these men went to Syria. All they know is these guys left, so what?" she said.

Aliyev had admitted that he'd known young men who went there, but he expressed shock and disapproval of their decision, she said.

Georgy Engelhardt, an independent expert on Islam, told VICE News that the "particularly brutal" treatment by the security services pointed to their fear of a new breed of Islamic jihadists getting trained in Syria. But Aliyev's injuries "would likely cause the security services to try to keep the whole thing quiet."

The group he is accused of recruiting for, Abu Hanif's jamaat, is generally not taken very seriously, according to Mairbek Vatchagaev, a terrorism expert from the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation.

"This jamaat is not very valuable for ISIS in Syria… They've been trying to find companions among Dagestanis, but it's not working out too well for them," Vatchagaev told VICE News.

If the group Aliyev is accused of working for is really as irrelevant as Vatchagaev says, it begs the question of whether Russia's security services are just grasping at straws.

Earlier this week, Aliyev was diagnosed with meningitis, making his chances of full recovery slim to none.

"Doctors don't know what will happen to him. They say he will have severe disabilities, he has damage to his internal organs, they don't know if he'll be a vegetable or not, and that's if he survives," Aminat said.

Nonetheless, the Federal Prison Service has been trying to take him back into custody, a fact that serves as a reminder of the zealous nature with which the security services wage their war on terror — casting the net far and wide, and likely alienating many ordinary Muslims in the process.

As Aliyev lays handcuffed to his hospital bed, breathing thanks only to life support machines, several families in Chechnya have been driven out of their villages for allegedly having ties to Islamic insurgents.

A day after the bodies of the militants who staged the December 4 attack on Grozny were identified by family members, several of their homes were torched by masked, armed men.

Whoever the men were, they had already gotten the green light from Chechnya's Kremlin-backed, strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who took to Instagram in the wake of the attack to declare that family members of militants should be held liable — and their homes should be razed.

The unknown men, according to activists from Memorial, a human rights group, burned at least six homes to the ground on December 6 and 7. Some of the homes belonged to relatives of confirmed militants, but others belonged to the families of people who were simply thought to have joined the republic's underground insurgency.

This take-no-prisoners attitude is not limited to Chechnya, as activists have raised the alarm about abuses in Russia's newly acquired Crimean peninsula as well.

Human Rights Watch has documented at least five disappearances of Crimean Tatars since Russia claimed the territory in March, and dozens of raids for "extremist materials" were conducted at their mosques, schools and private homes over the summer.

"The Muslims living in Crimea are really scared, and they have been writing to me ever since they became Russian citizens. They're afraid and they're asking how to protect themselves from the lawlessness of the FSB. They're all expecting the imminent appearance of such 'terrorists' as Aliyev at home," Ali Charinksy of the For the Rights of Muslims rights organization, told VICE News.

"The case of Aliyev is a ray of hope for Muslims. It might awaken society and show people how terrorists are made in Russia," Charinksy said.

Aminat said her brother's situation had left the entire family terrified of "what this government might start doing to its own people next."

"We're afraid for our brother, because even if he survives and is able to talk again — what happens if he tells them the truth but it's not the truth they wanted to hear?"

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Follow Allison Quinn on Twitter: @a_caseyquinn

All photos courtesy of the family of Photo by family of Magomed Aliyev