NEAR GROZNY, Russia, April 14 (AFP) - Russia is torturing detainees at secret "filtration" camps across Chechnya despite an international outcry over abuses at the notorious Chernokozovo prison, witnesses say. Ex-inmates interviewed by AFP in Chechnya and neighbouring Ingushetia confirmed the existence of detention centres such as PAP-5 in Grozny and one housed in a former school in the southwestern town of Urus-Martan. Ruslan, 21, spent nearly two months until March 30 in a dark underground cell in PAP-5 in the depths of a former bus maintenance depot, where he said guards meted out brutal beatings, torture and even committed murder. The Russian military denied the site existed when UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson pressed to see it and neighbouring PAP-1 on a visit to the war-ravaged Chechen capital a fortnight ago. "The guards would come in and say 'it's time for massage'," said Ruslan, interviewed in his home village near the northwestern outskirts of Grozny where Russian troops arrested him on February 5th. Placed on a stool, his hands tied behind his back, two or three masked soldiers would beat Ruslan with rubber truncheons and rifle butts for half an hour at a time, swinging blows at his legs, arms and back. "I lost consciousness many times," the young man mumbled hesitantly with a pained look on his face, before burying his head in his hands. On international women's day on March 8th, the guards got drunk and decidedto experiment on the prisoners, Ruslan said. Pulling up his trousers to show a deep scar in his left leg stretching up from the ankle nearly to the thigh, he explained: "They stuck a knife in me and then slowly, very slowly cut upwards into my leg. "You are a boyevik (a Chechen guerrilla fighter), we know you are," the soldier wielding the knife taunted Ruslan. But he was far luckier than others among the nine men squeezed into his tiny cell. Four were killed, including a 23-year-old from his village, Ruslan said: "I heard the shots when they finished them off after beating them nearly to death" in the nearby interrogation room. Deaths under detention also occurred in the former school in Urus-Martan, according to 30-year-old Alikhan Shakiyev, who was kept there for four days from February 29. One fellow-inmate, Aslanbek, 20, was dying when the guards dumped him back in their cell, but was refused permission to see a doctor. His wrists, hands, and fingers broken, he lay rasping as he tried to breathe, blood oozing out of his mouth. One hour later the soldiers took him out of the cell, and relatives then found his body abandoned on the street. The beatings and torture by elite interior ministry OMON troops took place in a windowless room, bare except for a table and chair, with a light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Seven metres (21 feet) away, Shakiyev and the others in his cell could hear cries of pain all day long. Many had nails torn out and on the back of one 18-year-old man, Aslan, the guards burnt a drawing into his skin with lighted cigarettes, according to Shakiyev. "It wasn't a filtration camp. It was a concentration camp," he said, interviewed in the Ingush border town of Sleptovskaya where he has taken refuge. Fear permeates the survivors, who said they had been threatened with severe reprisals if they spoke about their experiences. Just before a delegation from the Council of Europe led by Lord Frank Judd visited Chernokozovo in northwest Chechnya on March 12, Ruslan and others in PAP-5 were threatened by guards nervous the Western observers might turn up. "They warned us, 'If you speak to the foreigners don't tell them you were beaten. If you do, we'll kill you, they'll go away in any case and then we'll deal with you'," he said. Apart from the fear of talking, information is also scant because very few recent inmates of detention centres have managed to flee to Ingushetia since the Russian military do not return their passports. But Russian human rights organisation Memorial estimates there are already nearly 15 'filtration' camps holding several thousand people in Chechnya, not counting police cells and underground pits at many military checkpoints. *-------------------------------------------------------------------* CivilSoc is an electronic information service provided free of charge to 1,600 subscribers worldwide by CCSI--Center for Civil Society International--in association with Friends & Partners. To submit items for posting to CivilSoc, send them to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe from CivilSoc: 1. Address an e-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2. Leave Subject line blank. In the Message area, type: unsub civilsoc 3. Send message. 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