Courtesy of "The Voice of Muslims in New York"

March 3, 2000: Moscow- New evidence of Russian atrocities in the Chechen war appeared when a German television company aired a video tape showing a mass grave of people said to be Chechens, many of whom were bound and tied at the ankles. The footage also shows Russian soldiers kicking a corpse off an armored vehicle and dragging a dead body through a muddy field behind a truck.

A Russian television station also broadcast footage of Russian soldiers burying Chechen men with signs of mutilation and tied limbs.

The film, taken by the Izvestia reporter Oleg Blotsky near the Chechen settlements of Urus Martan and Roshni-Chu and broadcast by NTV, showed more than a dozen bodies being buried in two mass graves. At least one of the dead men had had an ear chopped off; several others had their feet tied.

The videotape of the mass grave provided the most compelling visual evidence to date.

"I was shocked by what I saw," Alvaro Gil-Robles, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, told reporters during a visit here to discuss human rights abuses in Chechnya.

Moscow denied the tape was evidence of human rights abuses, arguing that it showed the burial of rebels killed in fighting rather than having been executed. Serei Yastrzhembsky, a Kremlin spokesman, said: "This is the falification of the year."

The footage showed a dead Chechen dragged by a lorry across a field and Russian soldiers dumping a dead body from a tank. It showed a bed-ridden Chechen man telling of being tortured and beaten.

Mr. Blotsky taped the footage on Monday and Tuesday, and sold it to Frank Hofling, a correspondent with the Munich-based cable television network N24. Herr Hofling told NTV that he believed up to 45 men had been buried in the mass graves. Annie Rey, of N24, said she had every reason to beieve that the tape was genuine.

Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, said that he had asked his Russian counterpart to investigae the allegations. The office of Russia's Chief Military Prosecutor said that an investigation had begun and that the office was planning to obtain the footage to analyze it.