The court acquitted the coordinator of Gulagu.net accused of raping a former investigator of the Ministry of Internal Affairs

The Koptevsky District Court of Moscow acquitted the coordinator of the Gulagu.net project in the Vladimir region, Boris Ushakov, who was accused of rape at the request of Tatyana Kozlova, a former investigator of the Ministry of Internal Affairs with the rank of police captain. About it informs TASS with reference to the press service of the court.

Ushakov was detained in June 2020. While under arrest, he stated that law enforcement officers forced him to give false evidence against the founder of Gulagu.net Vladimir Osechkin, threatening physical violence. These testimonies could be used to extradite Osechkin from France, where he emigrated in 2015.

Osechkin himself wrote statements to the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Federal Penitentiary Service and the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, in which he indicated that Ushakov swallowed several nails in protest against pressure from the investigation and was hospitalized at the Sklifosovsky Research Institute. According to Osechkin, Ushakov “is in the power of the Federal Penitentiary Service and the FSB” and he is threatened with torture.

While in custody, Ushakov went on a “dry” hunger strike. After that, another prisoner was transferred to his cell, who ate food. Ushakov called this an attempt to create unbearable conditions of detention in order to drive him to suicide.

According to investigators, Ushakov raped the victim, threatening to kill her. Tatyana Kozlova had previously applied to Gulagu.net with a complaint about torture in the colony, where she was serving a 4-year sentence for fraud. According to Ushakov, on June 5, 2020, he came to her house to pick up his laptop, but Kozlova refused to return the equipment. Then Ushakov wrote a statement to the police, after which Kozlova accused him of rape.

In July 2020, the Golovinsky District Court of Moscow ordered the arrest of Vladimir Osechkin in absentia on charges of fraud with prisoner insurance. Osechkin called this criminal prosecution the revenge of the FSB and the Federal Penitentiary Service for numerous revelations of corruption in law enforcement agencies and torture of prisoners. Another defendant in the fraud case was 65-year-old insurance agent Mikhail Shneiderman, who was found dead after interrogation at the end of 2019. The body of the insurer with traces of violence was thrown into the yard of his house.

In early October, the Gulagu.net project reportedthat he had more than 40 GB of videos, documents and photos at his disposal. These files testify to cases of mass torture in penitentiary institutions in Russia. In particular, prisoners in OTB-1 were raped and beaten, and money and information were extorted from them through torture. Videos with the facts of rape were transmitted by “activists” from among the convicts on the video recorders of the administration. The head of the Gulagu.net project, Vladimir Osechkin, said that he received the video from a former prisoner-programmer, who “was beaten and tortured himself, and then they decided to use him as a professional.”

After publications in the media, dozens of criminal cases of torture were initiated. And on November 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent the resignation of the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service of the Russian Federation Alexander Kalashnikov.

Immediately after the scandal with the publication of the video of torture, the programmer Sergei Savelyev was also put on the wanted list, who handed over the archive with the recordings to human rights activists. But on November 10, the prosecutor’s office of the Saratov region stopped proceedings in a criminal case on the disclosure of classified information, initiated against Savelyev.