Lawyers of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture applied today to the Investigative Committee with a crime report. Human rights defenders asked the investigators to check the data concerning brutal hours-long tortures by the officers of SOBR (Special Rapid Response Detachment of the Ministry of the Interior) of student Murad Ragimov and his father.
(Photo: Firuddin Ragimov)
As we have previously reported, Gyunay Ragimova applied to the Committee for the Prevention of Torture and told human rights defenders that three weeks ago the police officers beat up her father and brother. Yesterday Firuddin Ragimov, father of Gyunay and Murad, also applied for legal assistance.
According to Firuddin, while a group of SOBR officers were beating up Murad in the kitchen on 30 of August, demanding that he confessed of ties to terrorists and sale of drugs, other police officers were beating him up.
– Two of them approached me, I said: “Guys, what’s going on”?! And one of them gave me a pinch in the back and I fell, – the head of the family recalls.
Firuddin claims that the SOBR officers were beating him up with arms and feet, repeatedly used electric shocking device. At the same time only one of the police officers was performing the battery. His colleagues were watching him, sometimes backing him away, when he, according to their opinion, was going too far. As Firuddin recalls, they were forcing him to confess where he hid the weapons and drugs.
Ragimov the elder recalls that during the battery the police officers left the kitchen door opened and he saw his son tortured. Firuddin thinks that it could have been done on purpose so that he suffered more, having no possibility to save his son.
– I said: “Guys, what on Earth are you doing?! Don’t you believe in God? Are you godless people?”, and they are laughing at me and one of them told me: “Don’t you know this is a country of lawlessness?”.
“Having obtained the explanations from Firuddin and his relatives, today we have applied to the Investigative Committee with a crime report. Now the investigative authorities will have to deal with what really happened in Ragimov’s flat on that day, and whether the actions of the police officers were legal, – lawyer from the Committee for the Prevention of Torture Anastasia Garina comments. – We will be conducting our own public investigation based on applications filed by the Ragimov family and, in our turn, we will be thoroughly monitoring the investigators’ work. We will also insist that the superiors of the Investigative Committee of Russia and the Prosecutor’s Office perform adequate monitoring and supervision of this incident investigation”.