On March 21, 2017, an e-mail landed in the in-box of the human rights ombudswoman for the administration of Russia's central Perm region. The sender's relative, Maksim Lapunov, had disappeared a week earlier in Grozny, the capital of Russia's southern republic of Chechnya, the message read.

"According to friends, law enforcement officers took him away, and there is no other information. I'm asking ask you to help find him!" the sender wrote, according to a copy of the e-mail obtained by RFE/RL.

A similar missing-person report for Lapunov had been filed with the Russian Interior Ministry the same day.

According to one friend, those close to Lapunov immediately suspected why he had vanished: Lapunov is gay.

Considering persistent reports of disappearances and extrajudicial killings in Chechnya, a mainly Muslim region that was ravaged by two wars over the past 25 years, some presumed Lapunov was dead.

"We didn't really have any hope that we would see him alive again," the friend told RFE/RL on condition of anonymity, due to the sensitivity of the matter.

But Lapunov, a party organizer and balloon artist, was alive. And after fleeing Chechnya, he appeared at a Moscow news conference six months later to give a public explanation for his disappearance: He had been abducted on the street by unidentified men while selling his balloons and held for 12 days in the cellar of a Grozny police facility.

During his captivity, Lapunov said, he was subjected to vicious beatings and psychological terror due to his sexual orientation -- and saw and heard others in the cellar being beaten and tortured as well amid what rights groups call a purge of gay and bisexual men by authorities in Chechnya. Read more via RFE/RL