| Wasn't this on Lifetime for Women last week? |
The hurried effort to free Elina Ersenoyeva, who was abducted by masked men on the main street of Chechnya’s capital on Aug. 17, began like many others. An account of her disappearance was compiled and circulated. Human rights groups and civil society organizations urged Russia to investigate and secure her release. She was a journalist and social worker, they said — another victim who had been swept from her life, apparently by Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin law enforcement bodies, who had been implicated in many kidnappings before. But the case has since taken a surprising turn, even by the bizarre standards of violence, organized crime and police brutality that have accompanied Chechnya’s lingering war. It turns out Ms. Ersenoyeva, 26, led two lives.In addition to her public positions, she was a secret bride of Shamil Basayev, the one-footed Chechen terrorist leader and Russia’s most wanted man, who died in an explosion on July 11. Ms. Ersenoyeva’s mother said her daughter had not voluntarily married Mr. Basayev, who remained unapologetic and defiant after sending female suicide bombers to Moscow and onto passenger jets, and who had planned the lethal hostage sieges in a Russian theater and public school. She agreed to marry him, her mother said, only because the separatists had threatened to kill her two brothers if she did not do as they said. “She was a smart girl, but she was used,” her mother, Rita Ersenoyava, said in an interview in the village of Stariye Atagi, south of here, from where she said her daughter was taken for conjugal visits with the terrorist leader. “Now she is gone. I have lost hope. I have lost a golden child.”
Whatever the circumstances of Ms. ErsenoyevaÂ’s marriage, whether she was Mr. BasayevÂ’s occasional hostage or willing wife, her disappearance has offered fresh glimpses into two Chechen netherworlds: the secretive life of Mr. Basayev and the murky circumstances of abductions in the Caucasus, which have persisted even as the pace of combat in Chechnya has slowed. Ms. ErsenoyevaÂ’s mother said her daughter was first taken to Mr. Basayev in late November, after Kheda Saidullayeva, the wife of the president of the separatistsÂ’ government-in-hiding, told her that she must marry a fighter. The name given was Ali-Khan Abu Yazidov.