Investigator Igor Razumkov failed to establish the guilt of two suspects in the case of electricity torture of Sergey Lyapin from Nizhny Novgorod and suspended the criminal case. Despite the fact that Mr Lyapin identified the suspects as the offenders who tortured him with electricity at the police department of the Volodarsky District in 2008, the investigator still considered that it does not appear possible to establish the persons who committed this crime. Human rights defenders with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, who represent the interests of Sergey Lyapin, are concerned that due to systematic sabotage of the investigation the persons guilty of this crime might escape from responsibility due to the expiry of the statute of limitations.
(Photo: Sergey Lyapin and lawyer of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture Albert Kuznetsov)
We remind that this criminal case was opened in March, 2016 by investigator of the Investigative Department for Dzerzhinsk of the Investigative Committee for the Russian Federation for the Nizhny Novgorod region Roman Shamshutdinov based on the fact of Sergey Lyapin’s tortures. Human rights defenders on behalf of Mr. Lyapin are convinced that initiating the case became possible due to the decision of the European Court of Human Rights which acknowledged the fact of Sergey’s tortures in 2014 and established that the investigative authorities did not conduct adequate investigation at the national level, so on 20 January of this year the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation made a ruling to resume the proceedings of Lyapin’s case.
In September of this year two participants of the events that took place eight years ago were declared suspects in the criminal case, at the same time one of them is an acting police officer, and the other has already retired from law-enforcement bodies. In the course of face-to-face confrontation Lyapin identified them as his torturers.
– It is still hard for me to remember those events. I have to meet my offenders again face to face, and they, in their turn, accuse me in lying and keep on trying to present me as a petty thief in this investigating.
Today lawyers with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture received a copy of investigator’s Razumkov’s ruling on suspending the pre-trial investigation on this criminal case.
“This procedural ruling of the investigator is not based on the law, it does not contain any motives explaining the reason for taking such decision, – this is the opinion of lawyer of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture Albert Kuznetsov, representing the interests of Sergey Lyapin. – Meanwhile, this is not the first case of direct sabotage of the case investigation by the officers of the Dzerzhinsky Investigative Department. For the first two months of the investigation, during which the investigation should be conducted in full, according to the law, nothing was done apart from a few interrogations of Lyapin himself. The victim was illegally deprived of his right to a representative; he was systematically not informed about the taken decisions. Even this ruling on suspending the criminal case we managed to receive only two weeks after it was passed, overcoming harsh resistance of the head of the investigative department. We will not only appeal against the suspending of the criminal case, but also will insist on punishment both for the investigator and his superior for such kind of “work”.