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Reports of Massacre Emerge From Grozny

Refugees Allege Executions and Looting

They charge that kontraktniki - Russian men hired by the army to fight in Chechnya - staged a drunken rampage of looting and gunfire through the tiny, bombed-out homes of a neighborhood in Grozny called Aldi. They say the mercenaries executed women and elderly men and burned houses and animal pens to the ground.

By the time the Russians left, carting away furniture, jewelry and money on loaded-down armored personnel carriers, dozens if not scores of residents had perished, the refugees say.

The survivors also tell the story of how Zina Labazaneva died, and of how a woman she never met, a 40-ish mother of teenagers named Sapiyat, helped give her peace in death, because that first Saturday in February there was no relative to wash Mrs. Labazaneva, wrap her in a white shroud and lay her in her grave.

A half-dozen witnesses to what happened in Aldi that day - though not Sapiyat - have been interviewed by the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch, which has compiled what it calls a credible list of 30 victims in Aldi. Other survivors have circulated a list of 82 dead.

''And after all this is finished, and we are out, we know that 115 were killed,'' Sapiyat, a tall, hollow-eyed woman in a long print dress and owlish glasses, said between sobs Monday.

There is no way yet to verify any of these figures, much less the circumstances of the deaths. The Russian government has denied that its troops have engaged in atrocities, and has called such reports malicious propaganda.

While refugees seem to have been generally safe from retribution for their statements, virtually all have refused to give their full names in interviews with reporters. One refugee was reported arrested this week after complaining in an interview about abuses in a Russian-run detention camp near Grozny. Neither Sapiyat's full name nor her precise location are used in this article.

In a long interview in one of Nazran's many refugee huddles, where she arrived not long ago, Sapiyat said she is alive today because of where she lived - on Almaznaya Street, the very last in a warren of curving, interlocking lanes that make up the Aldi neighborhood.

In the last days of January, Russian troops pressing their final assault on the Chechen capital began bombarding Aldi almost around the clock with artillery and air strikes. The Chechen guerrillas who controlled the area had left Jan. 29, but the bombing continued for three more days, she said.

''And then, suddenly, it became calm,'' Sapiyat said. ''And the troops started mopping up. We thought they would just check everyone's passports. But it was a cleansing of everything alive. They killed cattle, dogs, people - children and old people.''

It was Saturday, Feb. 5. Sapiyat said she did not witness what occurred, because she was hiding in her two-room house, listening to the shouts and gunfire outside, watching the flames and smoke of homes burning nearby.

But survivors and other witnesses who gathered afterwards told the story: A convoy of soldiers, in tanks and armored personnel carriers, began moving up and down the streets of Aldi, tossing grenades into cellars where families were hiding, forcing residents onto the streets. At various stops, they demanded money, gold and other valuables. Those who resisted were shot. Sometimes those who gave were shot as well.

On Voronezhskaya Street, three members of the Musayev family, from 27 to 76 years old, were said to have been shot and killed. At least three more - a father and two sons - died on Bryansky Street. At 88 Zemlyansky St., two sons died, only two days after burying their mother in their yard.

On Second Zemlyansky Lane, Yan Sultanovich, onetime administrator of Aldi, was shot in his yard. On Third Zemlyansky Lane, Adurahman Tasuyev, 51, and Ziyardi Akhmerzuyev, about 44, were shot in theirs.

On Mesayev Street, said one survivor interviewed by Human Rights Watch, 75-year-old Akhmed Abulkhonov rushed from his home to volunteer 300 rubles ($10.42) in tribute. The soldiers threw it in his face, said the witness, a woman too frightened to be publicly named.

Mr. Abulkhonov ran into his house and returned with $100

''You have dollars and you only wanted to give us rubles,'' the survivor quoted one soldier as saying. By her account, they beat Mr. Abulkhonov and shot him, set his cattle shed afire, then roped his hysterical daughter, Lucia, to an armored vehicle and drove off.

Zina Labazaneva, single and in her early 50s, lived on Mesayev Street, too, with her brother Hussein. Exactly what befell them is unclear. Sapiyat, several streets away, knows only this much: ''We went out and were standing with our passports outside,'' she said. ''I saw a soldier come; he wasn't a regular, but a kontraktnik. And then a whole herd came. The soldier shot his gun around the street'' - she made a side to side motion - ''and said, 'Everyone go into your houses.'''

The soldiers, Sapiyat said, were very drunk. ''They didn't come into the houses on the last street. They were probably tired of looting and killing.''

In the midafternoon silence, as survivors collected to exchange rumors, a woman approached Sapiyat and begged her to come to Mesayev Street. Her neighbors were dead, she said, and she needed help in washing a woman's body for burial.

It is a cardinal rule of Islam that no one should go to their grave unclean.

''I told her: 'I can't, I'm too afraid,''' Sapiyat said. Two months earlier, as she helped wash the bodies of two other victims of an artillery attack, a shell landed nearby, sending shrapnel into the room and killing another woman. But the woman insisted. Sapiyat agreed, and her 16-year-old daughter demanded to accompany them.

''And so I went to Mesayev Street, and I saw corpses outside,'' Sapiyat said. ''There was a man whose brains could be seen. There were a brother and sister killed, and he was an invalid. It was definitely gunfire. The bullets had gone through them.''

And inside the little brick house where the neighbor took them lay Miss Labazaneva and her brother. Sapiyat said the woman looked perhaps five years younger than her age. Her hair was dyed dark, though tinges of gray showed through. Two rows of automatic-rifle bullet wounds marched across her body, one at her chest, another at the abdomen.

Sapiyat, her daughter and the neighbor undressed the dead woman, bathed her and wrapped her in a white cloth from the neighbor's house.

Then, Sapiyat said, Zina Labazaneva and her brother were buried in their front yard, side by side with Mr. Abulkhonov and another man.

In the days that followed, Sapiyat said, Russian military commanders rounded up the men in the area, gave them their confiscated passports and told them to forget that they had ever seen each other.

A week later, Sapiyat left Grozny for good. ''I couldn't bear it anymore. I had to leave for my children and myself.''