The crackdown was first reported on Friday but the activists didn't release full details at the time."Widespread detentions, torture and killings of gay people have resumed in Chechnya," Igor Kochetkov, program director at the Russian LGBT Network said.
"Persecution of men and women suspected of being gay never stopped. It's only that its scale has been changing."Kochetkov said the new wave of persecution started at the end of the year when Chechen authorities detained the administrator of a social media group popular with LGBT people in the North Caucasus.
Kochetkov said the mass detentions began after the authorities got hold of contacts on his cellphone.
Russian authorities have strenuously denied that killings and torture took place in the predominantly Muslim region where homosexuality is taboo, even after one man came forward to talk about the time he spent in detention in Chechnya.
Maxim Lapunov said he was detained by unidentified people on a street in the Chechen capital, Grozny, in 2017 and kept in custody for two weeks, where he was repeatedly beaten. He was let go after he signed a statement acknowledging he was gay and was told he would be killed if he talked about his time in detention.
Lapunov, who is not an ethnic Chechen and is from Siberia, was the first to file a complaint with Russian authorities over the wave of arrests of gay people.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe last month called on Russia to investigate the reports, and Lapunov's case specifically.
-AP
