The Sovetsky District Court of Krasnodar declared the inaction of the investigators to be illegal – they regularly committed red tape during the investigation of the case of abduction and torture of Aram Gambaryan from Krasnodar. The court obliged the head of the Investigative Department for the Karasunsky District of Krasnodar to fix these violations.

In the morning of 21 March 2017, several armed masked men grabbed Gambaryan out of his car right in the center of the city, shouting “FSB is working!”, after that they brought him to the forest, where, according to the victim, he was stripped naked and kicked. “A man sat on my chest and started to question me. He was very heavy and I had troubles to breath under his weight. Besides, they were continuously pouring water on my face, which made me gasp and gave trouble speaking”, he recalls.

According to Aram, tortures lasted for about six hours.

Then Gambaryan was taken to the Investigative Committee, where he was forced to sign the record of interrogation with confession.

He spent the night at one of the Krasnodar police departments, and on the next day the Seversky District Court of the Krasnodar Territory sentenced him to ten days of administrative arrest for public coarse language.

According to Gambaryan, during his arrest he practically did not eat, did not drink and was constantly vomiting and felt sharp pain in the stomach.

During this time, the ambulance was called for him three times. Medics diagnosed Gambaryan with closed craniocerebral injury, brain concussion, concussion of chest, lumbar region and the left thigh.

After release, Aram returned to Krasnodar and on the same day, was hospitalized. During the admission, the doctors diagnosed him with acute renal insufficiency, acute interstitial (post-traumatic) nephritis, complicated by acute kidneys damage of the 3rd degree, mild brain concussion, multiple contusions, bruises of the body, massive hemorrhaging of lower limbs. In a week’s time, Gambaryan was moved to one of the Moscow clinics, from where he was released only in December.

The criminal case on tortures and abduction of Gambaryan was opened only in April 2018. Since that time there have been no defenders in it. Since that time, the investigators of the Investigative Committee for the Karasunsky District illegally dismissed the criminal case twice and suspended it illegally sixteen times.

After another suspending of the case, the lawyers with the Committee Against Torture complained to court against the illegal inaction. On 10 December 2021, the Sovetsky District Court satisfied the complaint, having considered the quality of the investigation to be unsatisfactory.

“The Investigative Committee is openly sabotaging the investigation of the case in the last two years, — lawyer with the Committee Against Torture Roman Veretennikov, representing the interests of Gambaryan, describes. — During this time the investigators have not done almost anything that would help to sort out what happened”.

Lawyers with the Committee Against Torture will be insisting on bringing the investigators and their superiors to disciplinary action.