Selima Ismailova, 19-year-old teenager who fled Chechnya due to domestic abuse, detained by police in Moscow. She will be sent back to Chechnya

Law enforcement officers are planning to send 19-year-old young woman Selima Ismailova, detained in Moscow’s Vnukovo airport yesterday, 12 June, back to Chechnya, after she had run away from home because of domestic abuse, Crisis Group SOS reports. 

“The young woman was detained at 8 AM on 12 June and kept at the [airport police] station the entire day. Selima started feeling sick in the evening, an ambulance took her to a hospital,” the human rights defenders explain.

Ostorozhno Novosti reports, citing Selima’s lawyer Anastasia Tyunyayeva, that two law enforcement officers from Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, landed in Moscow in the evening of 12 June, claiming that they have orders to take the young woman home. 

In the early hours of 13 June, Selima was taken to a hospital with suspected appendicitis. After the doctors concluded she did not have appendicitis, the officers from Chechnya bought her a ticket home for the morning of 13 June.

Selima Ismailova ran away from home because of domestic violence and planned to go to Germany, where she lived until 2021. According to the human rights defenders, law enforcement representatives detained her at the Moscow airport on the pretext of suspecting the young woman to have stolen 85,000 rubles (€938) from her father’s female relative.

Human rights project Marem reports that Selima ran away from Chechnya on 5 March. On 14 March, she wrote a note saying that she had “left of her own accord and there’s no need to look for her” and took a photo with it. 

Selima previously reported the abuse suffered from her father to the Directorate of Youth Affairs but then recanted her statement because of the pressure and threats from her mother, the human rights defenders say.

“After returning to Chechnya, the father often beat the young woman and threatened to kill her. In case of any wrongdoing, she would receive voice messages from her father threatening to break her legs,” Marem reports.

Selima was born in Chechnya. Her family moved to Germany when she was 12. In 2021, her father brought her back to Chechnya. Marem helped the young woman to evacuate from Chechnya, then she spent several months living in a shelter and waiting for paperwork needed for her to move abroad.