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Kungayeva's Family Finds a Home in Norway

Visa Kungayev being greeted by Torpal-Ali Kaimov, the spokesman for the Chechen community in Norway, as his family looks on after their arrival at the Oslo airport last week. Tore Bergsaker
Fearing for the safety of their remaining children, the family of murdered Chechen woman Elza Kungayeva has moved from the squalor of an Ingush refugee camp to a comfortable apartment in a small town off Norway's coast.

For three years, Visa and Rosa Kungayev have been in and out of courtrooms fighting for the conviction of former Colonel Yury Budanov, who last month was sentenced to 10 years in a high-security prison for strangling their 18-year-old daughter in March 2000.

Now that the battle is over, they are worried about the future of their four other children, who they say have lived in constant fear of Russian troops and are far behind in school.

"You can imagine how they felt after seeing what happened to their sister," Visa Kungayev said by telephone from the family's new home in the island town of Floro.

His two older children, Khavazhi, 17, and Khaza, 16, "are embarrassed because they cannot keep up with a fifth-grade level," he said. The two younger children are Khasi, 15, and Larisa, 13.

Kungayev said he is not satisfied with the Budanov verdict, which came in a retrial ordered after Budanov initially was found mentally ill. "The most important charge, the rape of my daughter, was dropped," he said.

A preliminary autopsy concluded that Elza Kungayeva had been raped, but later forensics experts decided that she had been beaten in the groin area with a blunt object, and the rape charge was dropped.

Budanov has admitted to killing Kungayeva, but said he did it in a fit of rage because he thought she was an enemy sniper. A Rostov-on-Don military court convicted him on charges of kidnapping, murder and abuse of authority.

"I asked them to give him a life sentence or give back my daughter," Kungayev said.

Human rights activists, who helped the Kungayev family relocate to Norway, said the guilty verdict was a step in the right direction. However, the family has received a number of threats, and it is not safe for them to live in Chechnya, said Patricia Kaatee, an adviser for the Amnesty International human rights group in Norway.

"It is the first case when a high-ranking military official is being forced to take responsibility for a gross violation of human rights. But it is also a tragedy that the family have been faced with so many threats that they have had to flee the country," she said.

"It wasn't safe," Kungayev said, simply.

Leaving those memories behind, Kungayev, 49, said he is looking forward to seeing his children go to school in Norway and plans to study the Norwegian language himself. He joked that after three years in court he and his wife have unofficial degrees in law -- and added in all seriousness said they were considering attending law school in Norway.

But this is not the last the family will see of Chechnya, he said. "We have not asked for political asylum. We will stay here until things settle in Chechnya and then go back home."

The Norwegian branch of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the UNHCR invited the family to move to Norway and has helped them obtain refugee status there.

They arrived in Oslo on Wednesday after flying from Nazran, Ingushetia, via Moscow and Stockholm. Waiting to meet them were human rights activists, government officials and members of Norway's Chechen diaspora, Kungayev said.

This is the first time the family has been abroad.

"They were walking around like they were shocked," said Ivar Dale, an Amnesty International volunteer who helped translate at the airport. "I tried to talk to the children, but they couldn't speak Russian and clung to their parents. The mother looked gravely disturbed but relieved that her children were safe."

On Thursday, the family arrived at their apartment in Floro, 540 kilometers west of Oslo on the Atlantic coast. "This exceeded my highest expectations," Kungayev said. "A room for the two older children, a room for the younger children and a room for me and my wife, plus two bathrooms, a hall and a big kitchen.

"The tent we lived in in Ingushetia was full of holes. It was freezing cold in the winter and boiling hot in the summer," he said. "The whole family lived in there, sometimes more when we were taking care of relatives' children from Chechnya."

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