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...''That night he told me everything. How they drugged him, ran electric currents through his body, put out cigarettes on his neck and broke needles under his fingernails."
Rasul was taken to hospital where he slipped into a coma. Within a week he was dead. The post-mortem examination blamed his death on internal haemorrhaging and damage to his major organs.
To the West, President Vladimir Putin presents the face of a staunch partner in the war on radical Islam, waging a legitimate fight against extremists in the south of his country.
As evidence of what he is up against he cites the brutal seizure of the school in Beslan last year, the downing of two Russian airliners by Chechen suicide bombers and numerous other attacks that the Kremlin regards as terrorism pure and simple.
But even as he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with western leaders abroad, at home his men are conducting a dirty and brutal war against innocent civilians that, far from combating terrorism, is driving them into the hands of a tiny minority of radicals.
The effect of these policies has been to bring the entire Russian Caucasus to boiling point and create an extremist threat in regions that have no history of militant Islam.
Republics such as Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayevo-Cherkessiya may have so far avoided the international limelight even as Chechnya has become a byword for brutality and terror.
But analysts believe each of them is now on the brink of escalating into a conflict that could sweep through the whole region.
Alexei Malashenko, an expert on Islam with the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, said: "The entire Caucasus is ready to explode."
[...]
