Fatima Bazorkina last saw her son on television - along with a Russian general who was demanding he be "rubbed out". Like thousands of other Chechens, her son disappeared in the war that engulfed her homeland. But unlike them, the television footage in 2000 gave her a man to blame - and she took her fight for justice all the way to the European Court in France.
On Thursday, the Strasbourg court will rule in the case of Bazorkina v. Russia and her lawyers are sure it will find Russia guilty of violating her son's rights. They hope that could force it to crack down on disappearances, which plague Chechnya.
"That would mean that somewhere there is the truth. To this day, I am still looking for the truth," she told Reuters in Moscow, where she has come to await the ruling.
"If someone is guilty for what happened, I want them to be tried under the laws of Russia." After her son - Khadzimurat Yandiyev - disappeared, she scoured the detention centres where Russian troops kept suspected fighters after they moved to crush the region's self-declared independence in 1999.
After she saw the video of her son being abused by Russian troops, she appealed to Russia prosecutors. In July 2001, 17 months after his disappearance, they opened a criminal case. In February 2004, they closed it again, citing lack of evidence.
For human rights lawyers that was wilful obstruction. Television pictures filmed by US channel CNN showed Yandiyev as a bearded and injured young man in camouflage, who argued with a general after soldiers demanded his documents.
"Get him the heck out of here," CNN had the general shouting, though the Russian words audible behind the English translation showed he used far cruder language.
"Rub him out, kill him, damn it. That's your entire order. Get him over there. Rub him out. Shoot him."
Yandiyev's body has never been found. But for his mother's lawyers, the general's words amount to an open-and-shut case. "The evidence is so clear, we have on tape a general giving the order to execute," said Ole Solvang, executive director of Russian Justice Initiative, a charity that provides counsel.
"The Russian rights organisation Memorial estimates that since 1999, there have been 3,000-5,000 disappearances in Chechnya. In 2005, there were 127 documented disappearances so there are potentially thousands of criminal cases," he said.
"I think this (ruling) will make the possibility greater that the Russian government will undertake effective measures."
Rights groups say Russian troops have used abduction, rape and torture as weapons in Chechnya and say the government has done too little to find the perpetrators.
Officials say they take the problem seriously but General Alexander Baranov, the man who appeared to be ordering Yandiyev's execution, has not been prosecuted. On the contrary, he has risen through the ranks and is now commander of all troops in southern Russia.
Officials say Chechnya has stabilised, and that the war is all but over, but Bazorkina was not so sure. "They are building a beautiful town, beautiful houses. There are little squares, fountains. But the tensions don't get any less. People still live in fear," she said, her face tired under a black headscarf.
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