The head of the Saratov Federal Penitentiary Service resigns amid a scandal with torture of prisoners

The head of the Saratov Federal Penitentiary Service, Colonel of the Internal Service, Aleksey Fedotov, resigned amid a scandal with torture of prisoners being treated in a prison hospital. About it informs Interfax citing a source.

“Fedotov wrote a resignation letter. He is currently on vacation, from which he may not return to work, ”said the agency’s interlocutor.

Earlier, the Federal Penitentiary Service announced the beginning of an official check of the information of the human rights project Gulagu.net about torture in the prison tuberculosis hospital in the Saratov region.

“A video was published on the Internet with illegal actions against an unidentified man. The author of the publication claims that this video was made in the FKU OTB-1 of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in the Saratov region. To check the reliability of the information, the director of the FSIN of Russia, Alexander Kalashnikov, sent a group of employees of the central office of the FSIN to the Saratov region, ”the press service of the FSIN reported.

Previously a Gulagu.net project reportedthat he received “more than 40 GB of video, documents and photos” with cases of torture in places of deprivation of liberty. Human rights defenders provided three videos from this archive to Mediazone. These videos depict torture and rape in the prison hospital of the Federal Penitentiary Service No. 1 in Saratov.

For ethical reasons, the publication published only a textual description of the video. In the first video, dated February 18, 2020, a man in black clothes shoves a mop, wrapped in plastic tape, into a prisoner’s anus. The man’s hands are tied to the bed, and his legs are tied and thrown up. The second man in black fixes the tortured, the third closes his mouth.

In the second video, dated April 10, 2020, a naked prisoner lies on his stomach with his hands rewound with duct tape behind his back. The author of the video puts his foot on his shoulder blades, demands to give a name and asks: “Who are you in life?”; the prisoner replies, “Nobody, tramp,” and another voiceover says, “Rooster.”

In the third video, dated June 25, 2020, a prisoner is lying on a bed. His arms are tied to the bed, and his legs raised up to the head of the bed. The prisoner is forced to introduce himself, after which he is raped.