Forty men and women have been detained and at least two have died in an anti-gay purge in Russia's Chechnya republic that is even more brutal than a 2017 crackdown, according to activists.

After the administrator of an LGBT social media group was detained in December, Chechen law enforcement began rounding up suspected homosexuals, LGBT Network said on Monday. It is holding people without charge in an infamous prison where gay men have previously said they were tortured, local residents told activists.

One of the captives died after officials repeatedly cut him with a knife during an interrogation, Igor Kochetkov of LGBT Network told The Telegraph.

“We can already say that the torture being suffered by those detained is savage, much worse than for those detained in 2017,” he said. “We know of two dead, but probably more have been killed.”

For the first time, women are also being systematically detained for presumed homosexuality, he added.

A gay man named Alexander who escaped Chechnya for France told the Russian news site Meduza that 10 people had actually been killed in the latest wave of the anti-LGBT “genocide,” and a friend who was imprisoned had seen bodies being carried away.