Life before persecution
Enver Umerovich Krosh was born on November 14, 1991, in Dzhankoy. At that time, his family had already returned from exile in Central Asia, where they had been deported along with hundreds of other families by the Soviet totalitarian regime. He received his secondary education in the village of Novostepove in the Dzhankoy district.
Together with his older brother, he started his own business repairing mobile phones. Later, he mastered several other specialties on his own — he installed air conditioners and repaired refrigeration equipment.
Enver married in 2012. The couple has three children: Kamila, Muslim, and Aziz.
Persecution
After Russia started taking over Crimea in 2014, Enver Krosh got deeply involved in his people’s community life. He went to searches at Crimean Tatar homes, joined in group prayers (dua), broadcast events live, and worked as a civil journalist.
In 2015, he was kidnapped by security forces and subjected to electric shock torture in a building seized by the occupation administration’s security forces for their own use. The political prisoner was required to cooperate with the special services, give false testimony against other Crimean Tatars, and was pressured to lie, which could have led to criminal cases and further persecution of his fellow citizens. However, he categorically refused to cooperate with the occupying forces.
In 2018, the occupation administration once again resorted to persecuting the activist — he was arrested for 10 days on trumped-up charges of “propagating the symbols of extremist organizations.”
On August 11, 2022, the occupiers conducted another series of illegal mass searches in the Dzhankoy district. That day, they broke into Enver’s house. In addition to Enver, six other men were detained that day – Vilen Temeryanov, Seityaga Abbozov, Murat Mustafayev, Edem Bekirov, and Rinat Aliev – as part of the so-called “first Dzhankoy group of the Crimean Muslims case.”
The arrest was accompanied by torture. He was taken away in a minivan accompanied by six armed occupying soldiers wearing balaclavas. On the way, Enver was beaten, strangled with a belt wrapped around his head, and his arms were twisted behind his back, forcing him to unlock his phone.
Behind the bars
In August 2022, the so-called “Supreme Court of Crimea” left him in custody, rejecting the defense’s appeal. The hearing was held behind closed doors, with lawyers and relatives not allowed to attend. In October of the same year, Enver Krosh was forcibly sent for a psychiatric examination in Simferopol.
Since 2022, the occupiers have illegally extended the term of detention of the political prisoner in the pre-trial detention center at least five times.
On June 5, 2025, the prosecution in a Russian court in Rostov-on-Don requested a 17-year sentence in a strict regime colony for Enver Krosh, the first four years of which he must serve in prison. The other accused – Edem Bekirov and Rinat Aliev – were sentenced to 15 years each, journalist Vilen Temeryanov to 13 years, and Seityaga Abbozov to 11 years (he is under house arrest due to his health condition).
Despite an independent fingerprint examination confirming the absence of political prisoners’ fingerprints on books allegedly found in their homes, they continue to be illegally detained in the dungeons of Russia’s SIZO-1 detention center in Rostov-on-Don.