Today, lawyers with the Committee Against Torture submitted an application in the interests of Ilkhom Alikhonov, whose brother was beaten up to death in the police department of the Solnechnogorsk District in 2014. Since at the national level the courts awarded Ilkhom a compensation for moral damage in the amount of only two hundred thousand rubles, his representatives submitted a complaint to Strasbourg.
(Brother of the deceased, Ilkhom Alikhonov, and lawyer with the Committee Against Torture, Dmitry Piskounov)
As we have previously reported, on 26 September 2014, a Moscow-area resident Ilkhom Alikhonov applied to the Committee Against Torture for legal support. He told the human rights defenders that in the evening of 17 September when he returned home his brother Farrukh Urozov was asleep. In ten minutes’ time, several Patrol-and-Guard Service officers entered the house together with the brothers’ neighbor.
According to Ilkhom, having applied physical violence, the police officers woke up his brother, handcuffed him and took him to the police department. As Ilkhom learned later, Farrukh was detained upon suspicion of using violence against six-year-old daughter of their neighbor.
Ilkhom explained that after a while police officers came up to his house again and this time they took him together with his mate Firdavs Sattorov to the same police department. There Alikhonov heard the loud cries of his brother, who was in one of the rooms. For some time, he even managed to see Farrukh through a cracked door: the brother was sitting on the floor with hands tied, a lot of bruises and scratches were clearly seen on his face, there was blood on the floor.
Early in the morning of 18 September, Ilkhom and Firdavs were released from the police department. Several hours later they learned that Farrukh Urozov died.
According to the forensic medical examination Urozov’s body and limbs were hit over seventy-five times. In the course of the battery twelve ribs were broken. Mr Urozov died of multiple traumas and strangulation.
Criminal case with regard to the fact of Urozov’s death was immediately initiated; one of the police officers was detained and arrested. In the course of investigation, the involvement of two other Criminal Investigations Department officers in Urozov’s death was established: later on they were also arrested and put into the pre-trial detention facility.
On 19 January 2016 the Solnechnogorskiy City Court of the Moscow region started examination of the criminal case on its merits. Over thirty witnesses were interrogated, ten volumes of the criminal case and numerous expert examinations were studied in the course of the five-month court proceedings.
On 15 June 2016 judge of the Solnechnogorskiy City Court of the Moscow region Stanislav Chepik brought in the verdict of guilty for three defendants. They were declared guilty of committing the crimes under part 4 Article 111 of the Criminal Code of Russia («inflicting grave bodily harm leading to the death by negligence») and items «а, b, c» of part 3 Article 286 of the Criminal Code of Russia («abuse of office using violence, weapons or special equipment, which inflicted grave consequences»). Deikun and Chernyshev are sentenced to seven years and four months of prison term, Gordeyev – to seven years and six months of prison term. The court made a ruling that they would serve their sentence in a maximum security penal colony.
The convicted persons did not agree with the verdict and appealed against it in the Moscow regional court. On 27 October 2016, the court upheld the verdict of the court of first instance and the appeals of the convicted persons were not satisfied. The verdict came into legal force.
In January 2017 lawyers with the Committee for the Prevention of Torture submitted a lawsuit to the Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow for compensation of moral damage to the brother of the deceased, inflicted by the police officers’ crime. On 18 May, judge Nelly Rubtsova partially satisfied the claims under the lawsuit, having decided to collect two hundred thousand roubles from the Ministry of the Interior of Russia for the benefit of Ilkhom Alikhonov.
Human rights defenders appealed against this court ruling in the part of the size of the awarded compensation.
“In our opinion, it is impossible to talk about the state commitment to eradicate the practice of torture in the country with such attitude to the victims of official crimes, – lawyer with the Committee Against Torture Dmitry Piskunov comments. – It saddens me, that even for such an obvious case as the death of a close relative caused by police officers, we still have to apply to the European Court of Human Rights with a complaint against the meager amount of compensation for moral damage”.