At present there are no grounds to believe that the Dzerzhinsk police is involved into Mr. Shushin’s battery and Mr. Levin’s death.
The Committee against Torture has finished the public investigation under Mr. Shushin’s application. You may remember that on 16 February 2010 the Committee against Torture published a news report based on the statements of Mr. Shushin and Ms. Petrova who had applied to INGO “Committee against Torture” for help.
Mr. Shushin claimed that on 6 February 2010 he had been beaten up and robbed by officers of the Dzerzhinsk Directorate of the Interior. According to Shushin, he was detained together with his friend Levin who was found dead later.
Specialists of the Committee against Torture immediately started a check and a public investigation under the above mentioned application. As a result, they thoroughly studied and analyzed the facts of the case. During the check inspectors of the CAT Investigation Department conducted a series of activities: obtained applicants’ explanations, inspected the place where Mr. Levin’s body had been discovered, questioned the people living in the block of flats where the body had been found, questioned the defunct’s relatives.
During the public investigation they obtained the documents for the stolen telephones, as well as printouts of Levin’s and Shushin’s calls. On 2 March 2010 the Committee submitted a motion to study the materials of the official check under Shushin’s application. On 9 March 2010 it was sustained.
The Committee staff studied the screenshots from the video recorded by room surveillance cameras which showed that Shushin had been heavily intoxicated while being detained in the Directorate of the Interior and could not move on his own.
The results of activities conducted by inspectors of the Public Investigation Department allow us to conclude that there are no grounds to believe Mr. Shushin’s statements about police abuse and involvement of the Dzerzhinsk DIA staff into Mr. Levin’s tragic death.
According to the expert opinion, Mr. Levin died of hypothermia.
Having conducted the investigation, the Committee against Torture staff got an impression that Mr. Shushin had intentionally supplied false data to justify his application.
It should be mentioned that in the refusal to open a criminal case under Shushin’s application issued on 12 February 2010 investigator Churilov from the Dzerzhinsk Interdistrict Investigation Department decided not to start criminal proceedings under article 306 of the RF Criminal Code (intentionally false denouncement) against Mr. Shushin himself for the lack of corpus delicti (cl.2 p.1 art. 24 of the RF Criminal Procedure Code), because Mr. Shushin had not been able to assess the reality objectively.