The Committee Against Torture started a check of a complaint of a battery of a 17-year old girl by Drug Enforcement officers

News

08 February 2022

Photo is provided by Natalya Loseva

On 17 January 2022, Natalya Loseva from Nizhny Novgorod applied to the Committee Against Torture. She told human rights defenders that her daughter Marina Loseva was subjected to violence by Drug Enforcement officers of the Chief Department of the Interior when she was 16. The Committee Against Torture started public investigation of the application.

According to Marina, on 7 April 2021 she was going to a café. Her boyfriend Bakhretdin Muzafarov and a friend Aleksey K. were with her in the car. The girl said that on the way the car started to break down and Muzafarov turned from the road to the area of the private houses. 

There, a badgeless car moved across the road. Several men in balaclavas came out of it, opened the door forcefully and pulled the young men out of the car. According to Marina, she was thrown against the car hood that her front teeth broke, and then the masked men started to search her pockets. Muzafarov was put face down and the men started to hit him with the machine gun in the back. Marina did not see what was happening to Aleksey K. at that moment. All this time, the masked men did not introduce themselves and did not put forward any demands.

Then, the other car came and two men made Losev sit inside. They took off the balaclavas and started to demand that the girl confessed of distribution of drugs. The men were calling each other Zhenya and Maksim. When the girl refused to incriminate herself, the men started to beat her up: with an elbow in the back, with a fist in the face, shoulders, thighs and an abdomen. The victim recalled that the persons who were beating her up told her “not to play the fool” and demanded that she told them where “the junk is”, threatening to pass her around. According to Marina, after the battery, she had a uterine bleeding.

A few hours later, the young men were taken to police department No.2 of the Kandvinsky District, where she was searched in the presence of the attesting witnesses, then – to the building of the Drug Enforcement Section of the Chief Department of the Ministry of the Interior for the Nizhny Novgorod region, where an explanation was taken from Marina. After that, the apprehended were taken to the Investigative Department for the Kanavinsky District, where finger prints and soles prints as well as saliva samples were collected from the girl.

On 9 April, Marina was taken to the Temporary Detention cell. She still had uterine bleeding but no hygienic aids were provided to her (exact cause of the bleeding is not known yet). She also recalled that her body was still aching after the battery. Loseva was diagnosed with: “hematoma of the right shoulder, hematoma of the left shank, hematoma of the left arm”. Later on, a criminal case was opened against Marina under parts 3 and 4 of Article 228 of the Criminal Code. Now she is under the house arrest.

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