Russia Today
Here's an interesting report from MediaZona via The Guardian which tells the story of strange and unexplained deaths in Russian police custody.
Now it's not a highly political story, in the party sense at least, just a call for public authorities to be held to account yet it's not something you would expect to here about on Russia Today which is keen to report on controversial issues all across the globe - except in Russia.
Under suspicion: death in a Siberian cell
After their experiences at the hands of Russian authorities, punk activists Pussy Riot set up a news organisation to investigate the police and prison system. Here MediaZona shines a light on unexplained deaths in custody in a remote region
The Trans Siberian train station in Chita. Photograph: Alamy
By Nikita Sologub for MediaZona - The Guardian
The town of Shilka lies on the banks of a river in the forest steppe of the Zabaikalsky Krai, a remote region of Russia on the border with Mongolia. Shilka is home to 13,000 people, and lies more than 120 miles from the regional capital Chita. Most residents moved here in the 1930s when the Soviet government increased the capacity of the local section of the Trans-Siberian railway.
Russian punk band Pussy Riot release I Can't Breathe, inspired by Eric Garner
Nowadays, though, the service to Chita is limited to three trains a day.
The town is surrounded by three villages — Bogomyagkovo, Kazanovo and Kholbon — with a total population of around 5,000 and a shared local police department. In September 2014, a criminal case was opened against the police, and the departmental leaders all lost their jobs.
The details of this case remain unclear, but MediaZona has learned that between 2012 and 2014 the corpses of at least two detainees, showing signs of torture, were found in the police station building. In Shilka there is talk of a third victim, although no evidence has yet surfaced.
Human rights groups regularly accuse Russian police of brutality and using excessive force against suspects, claiming that many are tortured to extract false confessions so as to meet the required quota for solving crimes. These allegations are extremely hard to prove, but a MediaZona investigation reveals many unanswered questions about the deaths.
Suspicions
The first corpse was found on 24 November 2012. Early that morning, Vitaly Tortoyev, a 20-year-old resident of Bogomyakovo, was delivered, drunk, to a temporary holding cell. Another detainee, named Khadzhiev, was already in the cell. Less than an hour later, Tortoyev was dead.
The young man had been brought up by his grandmother, Lyudmilla Sheveleva, after his parents died of alcohol abuse. After graduating from school he was prevented from joining the army by a heart condition, and had no official place of work.
Like his parents he often hit the bottle, but he had no criminal record. A few months before his death Tortoyev had married a local girl and moved in with her.
The police told his grandmother that Tortoyev had hung himself; but she finds this difficult to believe.
“When we spoke to his relatives,” said Roman Sukachev, a Zabaikalsky Human Rights Centre lawyer representing Sheveleva, “they said he had a ligature mark [around his neck], and his hands were clenched as if he’d been pulling the rope loose. His grandmother says they never managed to unclench his hands and had to bury him as he was. In my opinion this was murder. Whether it was his cellmates or the police, someone had a hand in this.”
How exactly the young man died is uncertain. Investigators did not look into the case at first, and no autopsy was conducted.
“A few days after the funeral, I was told [by police] that Vitaly had hung himself, but they didn’t say where exactly,” Sheveleva told police investigators. “Prior to that I’d never heard Vitaly make any mention of suicide. […] I now know that Vitaly died at the police station and that he was killed.”
By Nikita Sologub for MediaZona - The Guardian
The town of Shilka lies on the banks of a river in the forest steppe of the Zabaikalsky Krai, a remote region of Russia on the border with Mongolia. Shilka is home to 13,000 people, and lies more than 120 miles from the regional capital Chita. Most residents moved here in the 1930s when the Soviet government increased the capacity of the local section of the Trans-Siberian railway.
Russian punk band Pussy Riot release I Can't Breathe, inspired by Eric Garner
Nowadays, though, the service to Chita is limited to three trains a day.
The town is surrounded by three villages — Bogomyagkovo, Kazanovo and Kholbon — with a total population of around 5,000 and a shared local police department. In September 2014, a criminal case was opened against the police, and the departmental leaders all lost their jobs.
The details of this case remain unclear, but MediaZona has learned that between 2012 and 2014 the corpses of at least two detainees, showing signs of torture, were found in the police station building. In Shilka there is talk of a third victim, although no evidence has yet surfaced.
Human rights groups regularly accuse Russian police of brutality and using excessive force against suspects, claiming that many are tortured to extract false confessions so as to meet the required quota for solving crimes. These allegations are extremely hard to prove, but a MediaZona investigation reveals many unanswered questions about the deaths.
Suspicions
The first corpse was found on 24 November 2012. Early that morning, Vitaly Tortoyev, a 20-year-old resident of Bogomyakovo, was delivered, drunk, to a temporary holding cell. Another detainee, named Khadzhiev, was already in the cell. Less than an hour later, Tortoyev was dead.
The young man had been brought up by his grandmother, Lyudmilla Sheveleva, after his parents died of alcohol abuse. After graduating from school he was prevented from joining the army by a heart condition, and had no official place of work.
Like his parents he often hit the bottle, but he had no criminal record. A few months before his death Tortoyev had married a local girl and moved in with her.
The police told his grandmother that Tortoyev had hung himself; but she finds this difficult to believe.
“When we spoke to his relatives,” said Roman Sukachev, a Zabaikalsky Human Rights Centre lawyer representing Sheveleva, “they said he had a ligature mark [around his neck], and his hands were clenched as if he’d been pulling the rope loose. His grandmother says they never managed to unclench his hands and had to bury him as he was. In my opinion this was murder. Whether it was his cellmates or the police, someone had a hand in this.”
How exactly the young man died is uncertain. Investigators did not look into the case at first, and no autopsy was conducted.
“A few days after the funeral, I was told [by police] that Vitaly had hung himself, but they didn’t say where exactly,” Sheveleva told police investigators. “Prior to that I’d never heard Vitaly make any mention of suicide. […] I now know that Vitaly died at the police station and that he was killed.”
Second body
Two years later, another body was discovered in that same cell for administrative detainees.
On 9 September 2014, Alexander Lekhanov, a 42-year-old resident of Shilka, was found hanged. According to the deceased’s mother, Nadezhda Sokolova, he’d gone to meet his wife that after her shift at the grocery shop finished at 11pm.
“They must’ve been arguing,” says Sokolova. “Police were driving by and saw him standing in the road, shouting, waving his arms about, and they took him in. In the morning they called my grandson. He came round and told me, ‘Dad hanged himself in his cell’.”
In the morning Sokolova went to Shilkinsky police station to find out how her son had died. The police log book noted that Lekhanov had been taken in at 23.30pm, following a call from his wife.
According to Sokolova, a young investigator who took part in the man’s arrest reported that he’d conducted himself calmly and didn’t utter a single word on the way to the station. “I found this strange,” she says, “because the shop assistants said he’d been arguing and when he drinks he gets really short-tempered – I just don’t get how he could’ve stayed calm if they arrested him at night and took him away.”
The funeral took place a few days later. Sokolova says her son’s face looked unnatural – “all black and blue and swollen, and his lips looked as if they’d been glued together”. “I looked at him and couldn’t understand what was going on with his mouth. It was only later that I realised – they must’ve knocked his teeth out and then glued his mouth shut afterwards, that’s the reason for his unnatural expression. We’ve buried so many friends and relatives – no end to funerals – but I’ve never seen an expression like that.
“And his wounds were all strange, as if he’d been jabbed in the face with a sharp little knife. I was sitting there, crying over his coffin, wailing on about this knife. His mates were standing close by. ‘Who’d start jabbing him like that,’ they asked, ‘where’d they get a knife like that from?
“The ligature on his neck was really strange too. If he’d hung himself it would’ve been an even mark, but it was actually all over the place – wonky and crooked. They must’ve been pulling him from behind, the noose went wonky and made a second ligature.”
Sokolova believes that her son was killed. Because of the nature of the wounds on his body, she fears that he mayhave provoked the police. After the funeral, however, an official, whose name Sokolova cannot remember, showed her an excerpt from a cell surveillance video which appears to show Lekhanov taking his own life.
Lekhanov’s mother believes the video was manipulated. “I don’t believe it,” she says. “I saw the video, but they can manipulate it. And even if he did hang himself, why is he all battered, why is his face covered in burns? And what about those bruises? No one hit him on the video, did they?”
Internal review
Sokolova returned to Shilkinsky police station soon after Lekhanov’s death and asked for her son’s clothes before his body was taken to the morgue. She was told that his personal possessions had been sent to the “investigative committee” for analysis.
It was the first she’d heard of an investigation into her son’s death, but when MediaZona tried to get further details, the police department failed to confirm than any investigation was underway.
“This is the second son I’ve buried in a year,” said Sokkolova. “There’s no one to feed the family. They could at least return his things. He had a good windbreaker, his little lad could’ve done with having that," she says.
Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina established the news organisation Media Zona after their own experiences inside the Russian prison system. Photograph: Andrew Cowie/AFP/Getty Images
Sukachev, the lawyer, believes Lekhanov’s death and his mother’s informal inquiries resulted in an unplanned internal review of both cases. Five officials were sacked because of its findings, and later a criminal case was opened against them under a part of the law that covers “actions transcending the limits of an official’s power with the infliction of grave consequences”.
Violation of this article carries a sentence of up to 10 years’ imprisonment.
MediaZona has seen a copy of the paperwork setting up the case, dated 19 September 2014, in which an investigator known as Prapkov says suspicions had been raised over the circumstances of the first death, that of Tortoyev, which the local officials tried to conceal.
The report reveals that police were instructed to remove the body from the station and take it to the morgue, where a policeman fabricated the inspection report by claiming that Tortoyev had been found hanged in a residential building.
The duty officer, meanwhile, amended an entry in the official records, changing the time that the detainee was brought in from 20:45 to 16:15. MediaZona also has independent corroboration of thee claims.
According to Sukachev, after proceedings were initiated only one official – who gave the orders to conceal the evidence of a crime – was taken into custody, while others merely lost their jobs. After two months on remand, and with the investigation period drawing to a close, the court decided to release the official and give him a non-custodial order. “They deemed it sufficient punishment,” says the lawyer. “Here in Zabaikalsky Krai police are almost never kept in prison before sentencing – the maximum they get is two months in custody.”
A murder case was opened into Tortoyev’s death on 15 November 2014. It is as yet unknown whether it has been consolidated with the initial case, and whether it bears any relation to the death of Lekhanov. Sukachev, who represents Tortoyev’s grandmother, has not been given access to the documentation of this case, and police say they are unaware of its existence.
'Violence breeds violence': one woman's story of 16 years inside a Russian jail
Called to account
Meanwhile, Shilka residents maintain that Lekhanov and Tortoyev are not the only detainees to have died in Shilkinsky police station, and Sukachev is trying to track down relatives of a third potential victim.
Anastasia Kopteyeva, head of the Zabaikalsky Human Rights Centre, told MediaZona that over the course of a decade’s work the organisation had managed to bring a total of 45 regional officials to trial. “In the last three years alone, criminal cases involving as many as 11 officers from the Mogochisnsky district department of internal affairs and the Zabaikalsky office of internal affairs have been opened through the efforts of Zabaikalsky Krai’s human rights activists,” she says.
A version of this article first appeared in Russian on MediaZona. It was translated by The Open Russia Foundation.
Sukachev, the lawyer, believes Lekhanov’s death and his mother’s informal inquiries resulted in an unplanned internal review of both cases. Five officials were sacked because of its findings, and later a criminal case was opened against them under a part of the law that covers “actions transcending the limits of an official’s power with the infliction of grave consequences”.
Violation of this article carries a sentence of up to 10 years’ imprisonment.
MediaZona has seen a copy of the paperwork setting up the case, dated 19 September 2014, in which an investigator known as Prapkov says suspicions had been raised over the circumstances of the first death, that of Tortoyev, which the local officials tried to conceal.
The report reveals that police were instructed to remove the body from the station and take it to the morgue, where a policeman fabricated the inspection report by claiming that Tortoyev had been found hanged in a residential building.
The duty officer, meanwhile, amended an entry in the official records, changing the time that the detainee was brought in from 20:45 to 16:15. MediaZona also has independent corroboration of thee claims.
According to Sukachev, after proceedings were initiated only one official – who gave the orders to conceal the evidence of a crime – was taken into custody, while others merely lost their jobs. After two months on remand, and with the investigation period drawing to a close, the court decided to release the official and give him a non-custodial order. “They deemed it sufficient punishment,” says the lawyer. “Here in Zabaikalsky Krai police are almost never kept in prison before sentencing – the maximum they get is two months in custody.”
A murder case was opened into Tortoyev’s death on 15 November 2014. It is as yet unknown whether it has been consolidated with the initial case, and whether it bears any relation to the death of Lekhanov. Sukachev, who represents Tortoyev’s grandmother, has not been given access to the documentation of this case, and police say they are unaware of its existence.
'Violence breeds violence': one woman's story of 16 years inside a Russian jail
Called to account
Meanwhile, Shilka residents maintain that Lekhanov and Tortoyev are not the only detainees to have died in Shilkinsky police station, and Sukachev is trying to track down relatives of a third potential victim.
Anastasia Kopteyeva, head of the Zabaikalsky Human Rights Centre, told MediaZona that over the course of a decade’s work the organisation had managed to bring a total of 45 regional officials to trial. “In the last three years alone, criminal cases involving as many as 11 officers from the Mogochisnsky district department of internal affairs and the Zabaikalsky office of internal affairs have been opened through the efforts of Zabaikalsky Krai’s human rights activists,” she says.
A version of this article first appeared in Russian on MediaZona. It was translated by The Open Russia Foundation.
