Inside the prison camp at Chernokozovo, they call it the 'elephant'. 'They put a gas mask on your head. Your hands are cuffed behind your back, so there is nothing you can do. And then they close off the breathing tube and you start to choke.'
The torture victim, a small, wiry Chechen man, knelt down and made the sound of a man suffocating: 'The "elephant" was the worst.'
A second victim spoke of a refinement of the 'elephant': 'Once the gas mask was on, they would choke you, so you were gasping to breathe. And they would let go and you would breathe in deeply. And then they would squirt CS gas down the breathing hole. It was so bad just the sight of the gas mask in the room would make people confess to anything.'
The 'elephant' is just one instrument of torture used by the Russian occupation forces in Chechnya, revealed today in a joint investigation by The Observer and the BBC's Radio Five Report.
Russian security forces have mounted a series of cover-ups to hide evidence of abuses from the Red Cross and the Council of Europe. In the small Chechen village of Katyr Yurt, a torture victim blinded in one eye spoke of the screams he heard each night while inside Chernokozovo. The screams were so bad local people were forced to move away because they found them unbearable.
'At night,' he said, 'the things you heard were just terrible. Every night they would take people out of the cells. They screamed. They had their teeth bashed in, their kidneys smashed in. You could hear them being beaten from the cell. So then they would turn the music up loud, so you couldn't hear the screams.'
The youngest victim we met was 17. He was living in a refugee city in Ingushetia, next door to Chechnya. We shall call him Peter. He sat in front of us, head bowed, terrified of eye contact: 'They handcuffed your arms behind your back and hooked the cuffs to a chain so you were suspended from the ceiling, with all your weight bearing down on your hands and shoulders. And then they would use you like a punchbag. They called this "the swallow". They'd hold you for half a day like that.'
But this wasn't the worst torture for the teenager: 'They put me in a cell. There was something chemical in there. They cuffed my hands behind my back and said, "Go on, swim". I practically lost my sight when they shoved my head in there. There was also something else, a barrel full of water with a cage on top. You couldn't get out of there.'
Peter drew us a map. Painstakingly, Chernokozovo came to life. Barbed wire, steps down to his cell, the punishment tank where he was dunked in the chemical that left him blind for days.
The second victim - Richard - corroborated much of Peter's story and added his own account of agony: the 'meat-rack'. 'They crank a pulley to stretch you with chains attached to your legs. While they stretch you, they hit you with rubber truncheons, bottles full of water, targeting the kidneys.'
He also underwent 'the swallow' and electric shock torture. Richard said that one day in the summer a Red Cross representative - a French woman called Catherine - came to Chernokozovo. Could he tell the Red Cross about the beatings and torture? 'No, the guards had come round before and told us we would be tortured if we did.'
The Red Cross has confirmed that one of their delegates visited Chernokozovo; her name was Catherine and she was Belgian.
Our third witness is a man of 20 who has the voice of an 80-year-old. He screamed so much when he was being beaten that his vocal cords snapped. In a pitiful whisper, he too spoke of the usual welcome at Chernokozovo, the beatings, having to crawl into the interrogation room and ask for permission to enter.
While he was there a man was beaten to death: 'I don't remember the date, but they took him out of the cell one evening. We heard them shouting "Crawl, crawl". They were beating him and we heard him screaming. Then, the next morning, they led four of us into his room. His body was lying there. They'd broken all his ribs. They forced us to carry him out and dressed the body in the Muslim manner. We dressed the body, covered up with sacks, and they took us back to the cells. I don't know what they did with the body.'
All of our witnesses were interviewed separately. Although the Chechens, who have lost the war against Vladimir Putin's greater forces, have every reason to blacken the name of the Russian occupiers, the victims independently supplied such detail of torture that their evidence must be conclusive.
Another witness, Paul, 22, spent a month in Chernokozovo, where he says rape was commonplace, until his family bought him out for $500 (£340) - a year's pay. He had been put in the fridge, where they had to stand without moving a muscle. If they twitched, they were beaten. Paul suffered broken ribs, a cracked vertebra and a mock execution: 'They led me to the corridor. One of them cocked his sub-machine gun. They'd taken the first bullet out of the clip. They put the gun to my temple. As one pulled the trigger, the other clubbed me down. The others could see this from their cells. I'm already dead in their eyes. Then they dragged me out.'
The torture described is so systematic it cannot be the work of a rogue unit acting on its own. Following allegations of torture at Chernokozovo by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the Council of Europe was allowed to inspect the camp in March. At the same time, torture victims were taken out of Chernokozovo and put on a prison train that ran up and down branch lines. None of the survivors who were held in the basement - where the worst atrocities were carried out - saw anyone from the international agencies below ground. Neither Amnesty nor the Council of Europe mentions the basement at Chernokozovo - indicating the prison authorities kept it hidden.
The latest dispersal technique is to dump prisoners in pits - holes in the ground where the bitter cold of winter is a torture in itself.
One witness who had been held in a pit last month said: 'It was freezing. At night they would chuck in smoke canisters and let off CS gas. They threw stones down on us. It was the contraktniki - mercenaries - who did it.'
His family paid a ransom of $1,300 (£900) and they let him go. The Russians kicked him out of an armoured personnel carrier in the middle of Grozny with a bag on his head, leaving him for dead.
Putin - whose style has been admired by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook as 'open and refreshing' - has denied that torture is used by his forces in Chechnya.
Our last witness was eight months pregnant when thrown into a pit. 'They left me there for two or three days. There was no toilet in the pit. They urinated on me. They had stripped me down to my underwear; it was freezing, with snow on the ground.' They beat her repeatedly, she said, because she had helped the fighters in the First Chechen War, which ended in 1995.
When the baby was born, she said, its face was bruised black and its skull deformed.
John Sweeney reports on Radio Five Report at noon today.
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