9 employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service to appear before the court in the case of torture of prisoner Tsagalayev in the Yaroslavl IK-1

The Zavolzhsky District Court of Yaroslavl has received a criminal case on the beating of Abubakar Tsagalayev, a former prisoner of the Yaroslavl colony No. 1. The defendants in the torture case are nine already dismissed employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service: Vladimir Balanov, Igor Bogdanov, Alexei Brovkin, Alexei Vikharev, Igor Kamironov, Ivan Kokovin, Alexander Semenov, Ruslan Tsvetkov and Maxim Yablokov. Three of them are now under house arrest, the rest are under house arrest. informs “Public verdict”.

The criminal case on torture was initiated in February 2021 after the publication of new videos of torture of prisoners that took place in IK-1 in 2016.

A recording from a registrar of one of the colony’s employees shows how several people hold Abubakar Tsagalayev sprawled on a table while other guards beat him with truncheons.

The beating was preceded by harassment by the Federal Penitentiary Service. Approximately two weeks before Tsagalayev’s release, the colony officers began to humiliate him during the search, threw the convict’s Koran on the floor and scattered his food. After that, Tsagalayev was sent to a punishment cell, where, out of desperation, he cut his hand with a piece of glass. Because of this, the FSIN officers decided to beat him.

The four-minute published video captures only a fragment of the “educational work”. Torture, according to the prisoner, lasted much longer, several times he lost consciousness. After being released from the colony, Tsagalayev spent two weeks in the hospital.

The investigation of the first criminal case of torture in the Yaroslavl colony began in the summer of 2018. Before that, Novaya Gazeta published footage of the beating of prisoner Yevgeny Makarov, obtained by the Public Verdict Foundation. On the recording, Makarov was beaten with hands and batons on his shins and heels, pouring water from a bucket. On November 19, 2020, the Dzerzhinsky court of Yaroslavl acquitted the former employees of IK-1 — the acting head of the colony Dmitry Nikolaev and his deputy Igit Mikhailov. The rest of the defendants in the case were found guilty and sentenced to 3-4 years in prison. Among those convicted was Ruslan Tsvetkov, who will now be tried for beating Tsagalayev. However, Tsvetkov was released in the courtroom, having credited him for the time he spent in the pre-trial detention center.

Subsequently, other records of the torture of prisoners dated 2016 and 2017 were published. After beating one of them, Georgian citizen Vazha Bochorishvili, they sent him to the ShIZO, where he started bleeding. The convict died a month later in the Rybinsk hospital.