НАСТОЯЩИЙ МАТЕРИАЛ (ИНФОРМАЦИЯ) ПРОИЗВЕДЕН, РАСПРОСТРАНЕН И (ИЛИ) НАПРАВЛЕН ИНОСТРАННЫМ АГЕНТОМ «КОМАНДА ПРОТИВ ПЫТОК» ЛИБО КАСАЕТСЯ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ИНОСТРАННОГО АГЕНТА «КОМАНДА ПРОТИВ ПЫТОК» | 18+
In Nizhniy Novgorod, 3 and a half years after the complaint about the ill-treatment, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case under the article on excess of authority. In 2021, Roman Gusev was arrested while trying to steal alcohol from a store. According to Roman, he was brutally beaten in a police vehicle. Mr. Gusev ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw and an open craniocerebral injury.
In 2021, Roman Gusev tried to steal a bottle of whiskey from a store, but he was arrested by the police. In the police truck, Mr. Gusev had a conflict with an officer named Aleksandr Merkulov: Mr. Gusev refused to sit in the detainee compartment and pushed the policeman away. The confrontation was partly recorded on a surveillance camera. The footage shows that the officers are trying to pull him out of the vehicle by force, and when that doesn’t work, the officer goes back into the truck, closes the door, and the vehicle starts shaking.
Mr. Gusev indicates the following: «Merkulov hit me in the face with his right knee, I heard bones crunching. Blood started flowing from my nose, from my mouth. While I was lying on my back and choking on blood, Merkulov continued to beat me, I almost lost consciousness.»
Then the recording shows Mr. Gusev getting out of the truck and spitting out blood. After that, the man was taken to the police station, where his face began to swell severely and hematomas appeared.
«The area around my eyes was filled with blood, it subsequently caused large red and blue hematomas. These hematomas covered my eyes, and I could only see with my right eye through a small slit,» Mr. Gusev recalls.
The duty officer called an ambulance for Roman. The man was hospitalized and diagnosed with facial and rib fractures, the loss of three teeth, and an open craniocerebral injury. Mr. Gusev immediately filed a crime report, but the officers’ position boiled down to the fact that Roman was trying to evade criminal liability, and therefore accused them of beating him. Investigators questioned Aleksandr Merkulov: according to his version, Mr. Gusev fell face down on a metal shelf in the vehicle, and then Merkulov himself fell on him (allegedly, due to a loss of balance). A criminal case into Roman’s crime report was never opened, and in September 2021, he himself was convicted of using force against a police officer and sentenced to 1 year and 8 months in a correctional colony.
The lawyers, who had been trying to initiate a criminal case all these years, learned that on 26 November, after 3 and a half years, the Investigative Committee finally opened a case against Aleksandr Merkulov under the article on excess of authority with the use of violence (Part 3 of Article 286 of the Russian Criminal Code). The investigator questioned Roman Gusev: the man had already been released from the colony and did not expect that it would be possible to achieve anything else on his complaint about the beating of 2021.
According to the Crew Against Torture, the Investigative Department had previously adopted eight unlawful refusals to open a criminal case.The lawyers of the Crew Against Torture underline the following: «Such a delay allowed the loss of significant evidence, for example, recordings from CCTV cameras located in the police truck. Cellmates who were with Mr. Gusev in the detention cell were not identified. The police truck was not inspected, which is why the opportunity to detect Gusev’s blood there was lost.»