Obstinately refusing to instigate criminal proceedings against Kstovo police officers who savagely battered a couple from Nizhny Novgorod.

   Today lawyers of the Committee against Torture appealed against another refusal to start criminal proceedings in the Kstovo city court.

For more than a year Mr. Valeriy Onuprienko from Nizhny Novgorod has been trying to restore his violated rights and obtain a conviction for the perpetrators guilty of an atrocious crime that, according to him, was committed by two drunk police officers in the village of Chernukha, Kstovo district, Nizhny Novgorod region on 22 September 2007. 

According to the victim, he and his wife were battered by two heavily intoxicated police officers at the moment when the couple that was spending the weekend at their dacha went to a shop in Chernukha.   

According to Onuprienko, the policemen did not like the way his car was parked, and first they insulted him verbally and afterwards used violence. The officers handcuffed Mr. Onuprienko and hit him on the head several times, after that he was taken to the Kstovo Directorate of the Interior where the man felt unwell. The ambulance was summoned only two hours later, Mr. Onuprienko was taken to hospital where the doctors diagnosed a closed brain injury and lower jaw contusion.

However, the Kstovo Prosecutor’s office did not find any “objective ground” to start a criminal case against the policemen and refused to start criminal proceedings without even questioning the traffic police officers or duty officers of the Directorate of the Interior.