“THE youngest one was 16 years old, he’s from our village,” reads a post on VKontakte, a Russian social-networking site. “They recently brought him back, all beat up, just a bag of bones. They dumped him in the courtyard and said to kill him.”

The post was by an anonymous user from Chechnya, on a group for closeted gay people from the Caucasus. It was one of the clearer indications of a brutal anti-gay campaign believed to be unfolding across the Chechen Republic. Earlier this week Novaya Gazeta, a Russian opposition newspaper, published a series of reports claiming that authorities had been detaining dozens of men in a secret prison “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such.” The paper wrote that two recent waves of crackdowns have seen more than 100 men arrested and at least three killed.

“When the [electric] current is flowing and your body begins to shake, you stop thinking and begin to scream,” one survivor said. “You sit there the whole time and hear the cries of people being tortured.”

The atrocities described in the articles have not been independently verified, but groups with experience in the region agree that something is happening. Human Rights Watch says the story is consistent with what they have heard from trusted informants. “The number of sources and the consistency of the stories leaves us with no doubt that these devastating developments have indeed occurred,” writes Tanya Lokshina, the group’s Russian programme director. Ekaterina Sokirianskaia of the International Crisis Group, an expert on the North Caucasus, has heard similar reports from her sources. A hotline set up for Chechens by the Russian LGBT-Network, a rights group, received more than ten calls in the two days following the first publication in Novaya Gazeta.

The brazenness of the repression high-lights the extent to which Chechnya has become a fiefdom unto itself under its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. Mr Kadyrov’s spokesman, Alvi Karimov, responded to Novaya Gazeta’s claims by denying that there are gay people in Chechnya at all: “If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs would not need to do anything with them because their relatives would have sent them to a place from which they could never return.”

An intervention by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, might be the only thing that could sway the Chechen authorities to put a stop to the anti-gay violence. Yet the Kremlin depends on Mr Kadyrov to preserve stability in the volatile republic, and managing the Chechen leader has become a challenge in recent years. He commands his own security forces, numbering about 20,000 men. His republic follows its own hyper-traditional religious and social codes, largely beyond the reach of Russian law; Mr Kadyrov has voiced support for polygamy and honour killings. Discussion of homosexuality is taboo and most gay people remain deeply closeted.

This makes reaching victims and documenting the crackdown especially difficult. “Information gets through with a delay,” says Igor Kochetkov of the Russian LGBT-Network, which has also begun organising evacuations from the region. The true extent of the brutality may go deeper than Novaya Gazeta describes. As Ms Sokirianskaia says, “We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.”