The Russian Embassy to Israel said an investigation into the reported kidnapping and torture of dozens of gay men in Chechnya found that "there are no victims of persecution, threats or violence."

The statement came in a lengthy letter to Israel's Haaretz newspaper published on Thursday. It was formally a response to a story Haaretz published on April 5, describing secret detention facilities where gay men have reportedly been tortured in widespread crackdown in Chechnya, an autonomous region in the Russian Federation.

News of the crackdown was first broken in April by reporter Elena Milashina of the Russian Novaya Gazeta newspaper and since corroborated by international news outlets and human rights groups. Chechnya's leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has said that there is no crackdown because that there are no gay men at all inside his territory. But last Friday Russian President Vladimir Putin bowed to international pressure and agreed to investigate the reports.

The Russian Embassy's letter to Haaretz, however, suggests that an investigation has already been concluded.

"Authorized official government bodies of the Russian Federation, in cooperation with the government of the Chechen Republic, investigated the claims made by journalist Elena Milashina in her articles published in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and in other Russian media outlets," wrote Press Attache Dmitry Alushkin.

Citing the "results of the investigation," Alushkin wrote that there "are no victims of persecution" in the republic, offering as further evidence that neither the Chechen human rights body nor law enforcement have received reports of these abuses. (LGBT rights organizations have said that victims are frightened of retaliation for reporting their abuse.) An alleged secret prison, he wrote, "is a storeroom."

Alushkin also wrote that activist Nikolay Alexeyev has rejected the reports. Alushkin calls Alexeyev the "head of the LGBT community in Russia," but he is in fact a highly controversial figure who defended the Russian government during the controversy over the so-called "gay propaganda" law in 2013.

"In light of this, the Russian Embassy in Israel expresses its regret that a few Israeli citizens did not wait until the publication of the results of the objective investigation and rushed to spread factually incorrect information in the local media," Alushkin wrote. "We would like to note that the Russian system of government is of a democratic nature and we are calling to rely on objective and reliable data — and not on rumors and speculation — to analyze the political developments in our country."

The Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for the findings of the inquiry Alushkin describes.

Here's the full text of his letter: