Chechen authorities have used siblings to impersonate their dead brothers in order to cover up extrajudicial killings, a Russian newspaper revealed on Monday.

The Novaya Gazeta newspaper and human rights group Memorial reported a wave of extra-judicial killings in early 2017. Some of the men were reportedly murdered by local law enforcement on suspicion of being gay.

Novaya Gazeta published a list of 27 people that it says were kidnapped and killed by Chechen security agencies in 2017 and called on authorities to investigate. The list was later corroborated by Memorial.

The predominantly Muslim region of Chechnya in the North Caucasus has been scarred by two devastating separatist wars in the 1990s.

The Kremlin eventually regained control of it thanks to Akhmat Kadyrov, a former rebel, who was assassinated in 2004 and was later succeeded by his son Ramzan who has ruled Chechnya with an iron fist ever since.