Police torture in Russia causes public outrage

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV | Associated Press – March 29,2012

MOSCOW — Russia's top investigative agency filed new charges Thursday
against police officers accused of torturing detainees amid growing public
outrage over police brutality.

The Investigative Committee said it had charged four officers in the
Siberian city of Novokuznetsk in the torture death of a detainee. It also
leveled new accusations against a police officer in the Volga River city
of Kazan who is already in custody on charges of torturing a man to death.

Victims and human rights activists say Russian police routinely use
torture to extract false confessions from those they have arbitrarily
rounded up. They say police reforms undertaken by President Dmitry
Medvedev have failed to stop or even contain police crimes and achieved
little beyond changing the force's name.

Kazan resident Sergei Nazarov died earlier this month of injuries suffered
when police officers allegedly sodomized him with a champagne bottle. His
case has caused outrage across Russia and drawn calls for an urgent
overhaul of a force long accused of corruption and brutality.

The four officers charged in Novokuznetsk were accused of causing a
detainee's death by asphyxiation by putting a gas mask on him and cutting
off the access to air — a torture technique popular among Russian police,
according to rights groups.

Police regulations still require officers to report a certain quota of
solved crimes, a practice that encourages police to make arbitrary arrests
and extract false confessions to make their numbers. Police from across
Russia also learned cruel interrogation practices during tours of duty in
Chechnya and other restive provinces in Russia's Caucasus, contributing to
the culture of brutality.

In the Kazan case, officers rounded up the 52-year-old Nazarov on charges
of stealing a cellphone. He died at a local hospital two days later of a
ruptured rectum.

His death sparked street protests in Kazan that attracted nationwide
attention and led to a federal probe. The investigators arrested five
police officers accused of torturing Nazarov, and the entire precinct was
disbanded.

Local residents then began lining up to tell federal investigators their
stories of torture by police officers.

The Investigative Committee said Thursday that Almaz Vasilov, one of the
suspected torturers of Nazarov, has been charged in a separate case when
he and other officers tried to force a 20-year-old man to confess in a
crime by beating him and then pulling down his pants and trying to
sodomize him with a pencil. The committee said the victim managed to avoid
the torture by running out into a corridor.

Many others couldn't run away, according to Russian media, which reported
the stories of several other victims. In one case, a 22-year-old computer
programmer said officers from the same precinct tried to force him to
confess to a theft and then sodomized him, first with a pencil, then with
a champagne bottle.

"Where is the bottle? You always must have a bottle!" Oskar Krylov
recalled a police chief yelling to his subordinates, according to the
Gazeta.ru news website.

The Investigative Committee said it had detained that officer and his
colleague on charges of torturing Krylov.

The scandal over police torture in Kazan followed other cases of police
brutality, some publicized and others previously hushed up or unreported.
They include:

— A local journalist in the Siberian city of Tomsk died of injuries in
2010 after a police officer sodomized him with a broomstick.

— A teenager in St. Petersburg was beaten to death in police custody in
January.

— In another case in the same region of Siberia as Novokuznetsk, two
officers were accused of torturing a detainee to death in a garage and
then throwing his body out on a road.

Activists have urged the Kremlin to change regulations that encourage
police brutality, oust Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, conduct a
thorough cleansing of the police force and set up a separate independent
body to would investigate police crimes.

Alexei Navalny, a popular anti-corruption blogger and a key organizer of
massive opposition protests in Moscow, said the government should dismiss
all Kazan policemen and recruit new ones as a model of how to conduct a
future nationwide reform of the police.

"It can't get any worse," he wrote on his blog. "And they need to throw
Nurgaliyev out. How long can it go?"