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79. The applicants maintained that it was beyond reasonable doubt that the men who had kidnapped and then killed Idris Gakiyev were State agents. In support of their complaint they referred to the following facts. The armed men who had abducted Idris Gakiyev had Slavic features and had spoken Russian without an accent, which proved that they were not of Chechen ethnic origin. They had arrived in APCs, military vehicles only available to Russian troops and security forces, and used night vision devices. There had been no grounds to suggest that illegal armed groups could have been involved in the crime.
80. The Government rejected the applicants' allegations. They argued that it had not been proved that Idris Gakiyev had been abducted by State agents. The investigation file contained no information on special operations carried out on 30 November 2003 in Argun. The Government doubted that the neighbours questioned as witnesses could have recognised the noise made by APCs. They further observed that a considerable number of APCs and weapons had been stolen from Russian arsenals in the 1990s, and some had been captured by members of illegal armed groups in the course of battles with the federal military, while camouflage uniforms and night vision devices could have been freely purchased by anyone. The fact that the perpetrators had had Slavic features and spoken Russian did not prove their attachment to the Russian military because groups of Ukrainian, Belorussian and ethnic Russian mercenaries had committed crimes in the territory of the Chechen Republic.
81. The applicants' son had died almost four months after the date of his kidnapping, which proved that he had been kidnapped for a ransom and kept in detention by insurgents. Moreover, Idris Gakiyev had died of asphyxia. The Government suggested that such a silent method of murder was more likely to be used by insurgents kidnapping people for a ransom.
82. The Government also pointed out that, while both the first applicant and Mr Elmarzayev had claimed to have heard rumours of military involvement in the crime, they had not been unanimous as regards the presumed identities of the perpetrators. They had mentioned servicemen of different State agencies, such as the internal troops of the Ministry of the Interior, the "oil regiment", special task force unit No. 34 and police task force units. Neither of the victims had disclosed their sources of information and thus had impeded the investigation.
83. The perpetrators had stolen an {attache} case with some documents and had set the applicants' house on fire. This proved that they had pursued a certain aim and had had a criminal intent and therefore obviously could not have been servicemen of law-enforcement agencies.
B. The Court's evaluation of the facts
1. General principles
84. In cases in which there are conflicting accounts of events, the Court is inevitably confronted when establishing the facts with the same difficulties as those faced by any first-instance court. When, as in the instant case, the respondent Government have exclusive access to information capable of corroborating or refuting the applicants' allegations, any lack of cooperation by the Government without a satisfactory explanation may give rise to the drawing of inferences as to the well-foundedness of the applicant's allegations (see {Tanis} and Others v. Turkey, No. 65899/01, § 160, ECHR 2005-...).
85. The Court points out that a number of principles have been developed in its case-law when it is faced with the task of establishing facts on which the parties disagree. As to the facts that are in dispute, the Court reiterates its jurisprudence confirming the standard of proof "beyond reasonable doubt" in its assessment of evidence (see {Avsar} v. Turkey, No. 25657/94, § 282, ECHR 2001-VII (extrac
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