In Sochi, the Investigative Committee did not see enough grounds for opening a criminal case based on application by Evgeny Bondar, who told that police officers were beating and torturing him with electrical shocker, demanding that he unblocked his phone. That is how they wanted to know the whereabouts of Evgeny’s acquaintance, Vladimir Moshkin, a crypto entrepreneur.

According to Bondar, the police officers apprehended him on 20 January 2022, when he was riding on a train, seized his two phones and took him to the building of the department of economic security. Bondar said that there his head and legs were beaten, and he was smashed with his head against the wall.  After that he was taken to the office of Kangen company in Adler and to his home – a search was conducted in both premises. Then, he was taken to the economic security department again and interrogated for several more hours. When Evgeny once again refused to tell the passwords, three men in balaclavas entered the room and started beating his legs, genitals, buttocks and anus with electrical shocker. Having yielded to torture, Bondar told the passwords to the police officers.  

Then, Evgeny was taken again to the Department of the Interior of Sochi and taken to the investigator’s room. There, the man signed, as he understood, the protocol of his interrogation in the capacity of a witness in the fraud case. Bondar recalled that in the first place the police officers and the investigator were interested in where Moshkin was and how to obtain access to the businessman’s bitcoin account. After the interrogation, Bondar was released.  

On the next day, in the Adler medical center “Daniel” Evgeny was diagnosed with a contusion of a rib cage, bruises on the chest, legs and genitals, contusion of an elbow joint and genitals. Later on, at the St. Petersburg bureau of the medical forensic expert examination he was diagnosed with the same traumas and contusions of the face.  

Evgeny submitted a report on the crime of the police officers on 14 February. A month later, investigator Artem Andrianov issued a dismissal of a claim to open a criminal case due to absence of the element of crime “abuse of office” in the police officers’ actions, referring to the presumption of innocence.   

— If the police officers told the investigator that they did not torture Evgeny Bondar’, it means that he made everything up — that’s what follows from the investigator’s dismissal of the claim to open a criminal case. Judging by the text of the document, for the whole month the investigator did not bother to check the other sources of information, — lawyer with the Committee Against Torture Roman Veretennikov comments. — The investigator ignored our requests to obtain information that could prove Bondar’s words. Such a check cannot be called effective and we hope that the superiors of the Investigative Department will quash this ruling.