Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images(MOSCOW) — Five LGBT activists have been arrested in Moscow as they tried to deliver a petition calling on Russian authorities to investigate the alleged detention and torture of dozens of gay men in Chechnya.

One of the activists from the group LGBT Network, Nikita Safranov, spoke to ABC News from inside the police station where he and the four others were being detained. Safranov said they were arrested today while walking toward the offices of Russia’s prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, in central Moscow.

The group was carrying large stacks of boxes stamped with the words “Justice for the Chechen 100” and filled with copies of the petition. Safranov said they expected to be charged with staging an unsanctioned demonstration.

The group’s petition, which was launched on Change.org, calls for Russia’s prosecutor to investigate recent reports that more than 100 men have been kidnapped and tortured by authorities in Chechnya as part of an alleged roundup targeting the gay community there.

Reports of the alleged roundup emerged in early April after the independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, published articles detailing accounts of how Chechen security forces were detaining the men and holding them in secret prisons. The newspaper said sources in Chechnya’s security services and the LGBT community described the detentions as a “prophylactic purge” against homosexuals in the southern Russian republic, where homosexuality is widely viewed as shameful.

Since then, testimonies have emerged from some of the men detained, detailing brutal tortures. One man, who requested anonymity in an interview with ABC News last month, described how Chechen law enforcement agents had kept him in jail for a week, beat him with plastic rods and tortured him with electric shocks.

Testimony from the man, whom ABC News is identifying as Z., and from other men published in Novaya Gazeta, The Guardian and The New York Times said the agents demanded that those detained name other gay men, forming a chain of terror.

Irina Gordienko, a reporter at Novaya Gazeta, told ABC News that the newspaper believes around 200 men had been detained and that it has proof that at least three men had been killed during the purge.

Z., who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concerns for his safety, told ABC News he was released after the agents could find no proof he was gay. But he then fled Chechnya when a mutual acquaintance was detained, fearing authorities would return for him again.

Some of the victims said police had handed them back to their families after the detentions and told them they should kill them themselves to save their honor.

Chechen authorities have denied that the detentions are taking place. A spokesman for Ramzan Kadyrov, the region’s president, has said such persecutions were impossible because Chechnya does not have gay men.

The regional branch of the Prosecutor’s Office in Chechnya has opened an investigation into the reports, but the denunciations from Kadyrov, who personally controls law enforcement in the region, has cast doubt that it will find anything.

The Kremlin has also been reluctant to respond to the reports. President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, initially told reporters that anyone suffering abuses should report them to law enforcement.

Putin himself commented publicly for the first time on the reports last week, saying he would ask federal law enforcement to investigate.

The alleged detentions have prompted condemnation from around the world. The foreign ministers of Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, France and Sweden sent a joint letter last week calling on Russia to investigate.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley issued a statement in April saying the abuses “cannot be ignored.” The State Department said it was “deeply disturbed” by the reports.

LGBT Network has been helping gay men to leave Chechnya. To date, it has helped 42 people escape, the organization told ABC News.

Some of these men have been provided with safe-houses in Russia, but the organization is trying to get them asylum abroad in Europe or the United States.

Igor Kochetkov, the group’s director, said three European countries were examining the possibility of offering asylum, but no offers have been made so far.

Copyright © 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.