FOR SIX YEARS, the torture chamber lay hidden in the cellars of what had once been an orphanage for deaf children. The residents of Grozny's October district knew about it. They could hear the screams emanating from its sinister bowels. The Russian authorities who first controlled it, though, insisted that it was just an ordinary prison.

The Chechen government the Kremlin appointed to succeed them denied it existed at all. But when representatives from the Russian human rights group Memorial managed to sneak in this summer just before the building's demolition, the truth was finally laid bare.

The chilling graffiti on the prison's walls, some of it written in blood, gave some of the most compelling evidence yet of what activists had claimed for years: state-sanctioned torture had been carried out in Chechnya, perhaps systematically, ever since Russian forces took Grozny in early 2000.

Inmates had scrawled their names and even the dates of their incarceration across the chamber's fetid walls alongside desperate messages of the ordeals they had suffered.

"What day is it?'' read one. "What year is it? Am I still alive?''

Those inmates who survived at the October prison had frequently tried to complain about their experiences, but they had been ignored. With the new evidence, however, the Kremlin may now have to listen to their stories.

One of the most harrowing is told by Alavdi Sadykov, a 56-year-old former PE teacher, who spent three months in the prison in 2000. Mr Sadykov does not know for sure why he was arrested, or why he was tortured for 83 days or even why he was released when so many of his fellow inmates were killed.

Six years later, still looking for answers...