Vyacheslav Petrosyan from the Krasnodar Territory is claiming that the police officers were beating him up when he was handcuffed and used electric shocker on him in February of this year. After almost six months after the complaint about battery, the Investigative Committee investigators issued six illegal refusals to initiate criminal proceedings, without even questioning important witnesses.
On 3 March 2020, Vyacheslav Petrosyan from Apsheronsk, the Krasnodar Territory, applied to the Committee Against Torture for legal assistance. He reported that he was a defendant in the criminal case which was being examined by the Apsheronsk District Court and was kept in custody. On 12 February, during the court hearing, as a mark of protest against the actions of the judge, who established that the court hearing should be conducted behind closed doors, he scratched his hands and neck with nail clippers. In response to such an action, he and two other convicts were delivered from the court building to the local temporary detention facility.
According to Petrosyan, in the inner court of the police building next to the entry to the Temporary Detention Facility, the convoy officers brought him on the ground and started to beat him up with arms and feet: “When I got out of the car, they hit me at my right side, that made me fall. They removed handcuffs from me and put them again after pulling my arms behind my back, and fastened my feet with a scotch tape. After that they started to strangle me and kicked me in the right eye. There were blows at my right side. Someone shouted: “enough”, the other one responded – “he’s got a lot of health”.
According to Vyacheslav, apart from kicks and blows, an electric shocker was also applied on various parts of his body.
After that, according to Petrosyan, he was taken to the investigative department of Krasnodar where he was not accepted twice due to presence of injuries, and accepted him only after he was provided with medical assistance in various medical institutions of Krasnodar.
According to the available medical documentation, on 12 February, Vyacheslav Petrosyan was diagnosed with the following bodily injuries: “Bruises of the soft tissues of the head. Paraorbital hematoma on the left. Mild contusion of the left eye. Contusion of the left knee joint”.
On 18 February, during the visit of members of the Public Monitoring Commission for the Krasnodar Territory of Mr Petrosyan at the Temporary Detention Facility, various bodily injuries were also registered on him, with regard to that the public observers applied to the Investigative Committee with a crime report.
By the present time, investigators of the Belorechensky Interdistrict Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee of the RF for the Krasnodar Territory issued six refusals to initiate criminal proceedings which were subsequently quashed as illegal.
“At the present time, the investigators started the seventh check based on Petrosyan’s application about the battery by the police officers, – lawyer with the Committee Against Torture Roman Veretennikov, representing the interests of Vyacheslav Petrosyan, comments. – And we cannot call such work of the investigators effective: when in July we familiarized ourselves with the material of the check on this application, we learned that during this time the important witnesses who heard Petrosyan’s screaming at the Temporary Detention Facility were never questioned, no conclusion of the medical forensic expert was obtained (he was assigned to perform an expert examination back on 21 February). We intend to point at these and other violations in our complaint to the Prosecutor regarding the red tape of the investigation”.