Novye Aldi massacre

Chechnya, Novye-Aldi massacre
Location	Groznensky District, Chechnya
Date	February 5, 2000
Target	Novye Aldi and Chernorechie suburbs of Grozny
Attack type	Killing spree, arson, rape, robbery, massacre
Deaths	60–82
Perpetrators	OMON

The Novye Aldi massacre was a mass killing in which Russian federal forces summarily executed dozens of people in the Novye Aldi (Aldy) suburb of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in the course of a "mopping-up" (zachistka) operation conducted there on February 5, 2000, soon after the end of the battle for the city. As a result of a deadly rampage by the special police forces, between 60 to 82 local civilians were killed and at least six women were raped. Numerous houses were also burned and civilian property was stolen in an organized manner.

The official investigation into the Aldi massacre established that the "sweep operation" there was conducted by the paramilitary police of OMON from the northern Russian city of Saint Petersburg (possibly also from the southern Ryazan Oblast), yet as of 2016 the Russian authorities have failed to hold anyone to account for the crime. The guilt of the Russian state in the Aldi murders and the denial of justice to the victims has been formally established in two different judgements by the European Court of Human Rights several years later in 2006–07.

Novye Aldi (New Aldi) is a residential suburb to the south-west of the city and east of the villages of Alkhan-Yurt and Alkhan-Kala and the now-flattened Grozny oil refineries, next to the M-29 highway. Its population had been 27,000 people before the war, but most of the residents had fled the fighting in the last months of 1999, leaving behind approximately 2,000 people who were too old or otherwise incapable of the journey to safety. It appears that the suburb was not used by Chechen fighters in any way during the war and there are no reports of clashes with the Russian forces in Aldi. However, approximately 63 residents were killed between December 1999 and February 2000 by federal artillery and mortar fire in the course of the siege of the city. At least five of them died during the barrage of February 3–4 which included cluster bomb air strikes (among them three members of the ethnic Russian Smirnov family killed when their house was hit in the last hours of the bombardment). Aldi itself was not a target prior to February 3 and the casualties appear to have been inflicted by stray shells and rockets fired at neighboring areas such as District 20.

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