Report Says Popular Gay Chechen Singer Executed on Orders of Country's Strongman Leader

The human rights organization NC SOS Crisis Group purports to clear up the mystery of what happened to popular Chechen singer Zelimkhan Bakaev. A report the group posted alleges that Bakaev was the victim of an extrajudicial execution, murdered on orders from Chechnya's strongman leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who is a close ally of Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Bakaev vanished in 2017 at the age of 25. The Daily Beast recalled that though he had been living in Moscow, Bakaev went home to attend the wedding of his sister.

But he never returned to Moscow after the trip. "Human rights groups sounded the alarm over his disappearance, warning that he had likely been targeted as part of an anti-gay purge underway in the predominantly Muslim region," The Daily Beast detailed, while Kadyrov suggested that the singer's own family had committed an "honor killing" due to his sexuality.

Bakaev was specifically targeted, the NC SOS Crisis Group now claims in a report that says "Bakaev was tailed by Chechen security services tasked with determining whether or not he was gay," the Daily Beast article relayed.

"An unnamed source close to Kadyrov was quoted describing how the Chechen leader, upon learning of Bakaev's sexuality, took it as a personal insult, since he and Bakaev had previously shaken hands and posed for a photo together," the writeup said.

"He responded by ordering his security forces to 'deal with' the young singer, according to the report."

The human rights group's report states that Bakaev was tortured before being killed. His dead body was then delivered to his family, with instructions "to 'bury him like a dog,'" the group claims.

When the disappearance garnered international attention, "Chechen state television touted two clearly staged YouTube videos as proof that he was alive and well in Germany," The Daily Beast recalled.

But the ruse wasn't maintained for long. At the beginning of 2018, Kadyrov said that the singer's own family had murdered him and wondered aloud why they weren't taking credit for it.

Far from taking credit, Bakaev's father stated in no uncertain terms that no one in their family had harmed the singer, The Daily Beast recounted.

Reports of LGBTQ+ people being rounded up, tortured, interrogated, held for ransom, and murdered have circulated for years. More recently, there have been reports of Chechen LGBTQ+ people being sent to fight in Ukraine for Russia.

In 2019, Chechen officials, including Kadyrov, reportedly called for families in the country to murder their own family members if they were LGBTQ+. Paradoxically, Kadyrov also insisted that there were no LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya.