Survivors of the secret prisons, where LGBTQ people are tortured, humiliated, interrogated, and killed, are speaking out about the horrors going on inside Chechnya.

Chechen officials continue to deny the reports, it is clear from accounts such as those you will see in the video below that life as an LGBTQ person in the Russian controlled region is beyond dangerous.

According to the British government, Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, plans to eliminate the LGBTQ community by the start of Ramadan, less than a month away. Survivors have outlined abuses including electrocution and beatings, and shared that when and if they are brought back home, their families are told they should murder them in an honor killing.

A man who made it out alive shared that families are invited to the prison sites and told to kill their relative, or else the authorities will do it themselves. The man, whose identity has been protected over fears for his safety said,

“They tell the parents to kill their child. They say, ‘Either you do it or we will.’ They call it, ‘Cleaning your honor with blood.’

They tortured a man for two weeks. They summoned his parents and his brothers who all came. They said to them, ‘Your son is a homosexual. Sort it out or we’ll do it ourselves.’ They replied, ‘It’s our family, we’ll do it.’ The family took him and killed him in the forest. They buried him there. They didn’t even give him a funeral.”

The man said that if he went home, he believes his family would do the same, leaving him to suffer the same fate.

“We’ve always been persecuted, but never like this. Now they arrest everyone. They kill people. They do whatever they want. They know that nobody will come after them. Because the order has come from above to ‘cleanse the nation’ of people like us.”

Horrifying. This was hard for me to report, as it makes me physically ill. What can be done to stop this? Share this story so at least people know. There needs to an outcry heard around the world.

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(via LGBTQ Nation)