After a year in the grip of Russian soldiers, this bleak capital of the republic of Chechnya has deteriorated into a killing field where gunfire rattles through the night and corpses float in sewers, pile up in abandoned houses and rest in shallow graves. A man trying to fix a clogged drain opened a manhole cover recently and discovered a half-dozen corpses in the sewer. Hundreds of residents have disappeared after being arrested by Russian soldiers.
Anxious families circulate photographs and scour communal burial grounds for missing relatives.
Ruslan Hasukhanov and Zelim Khatuyev disappeared after the Russian soldiers who surrounded their suburban village arrested them on Jan. 30. Last week, boys playing in a field saw a leg protruding from the earth. Khatuyev's body was recovered from a shallow pit surrounded by booby traps. Both had been stabbed and beaten. Hasukhanov's killers cut out one of his eyes.