Chairman of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture Igor Kalyapin appealed against the eighth refusal to initiate criminal proceedings based on the fact of attack against him in March of last year near the hotel in the center of Grozny. In his complaint Kalyapin pointed out that the investigators of the Ministry of the Interior who performed a check based on his complaint did not perform a lot of verification activities, including the ones prescribed by the Prosecutor’s Office.
As we have previously reported, on 16 March of last year a group of young people attacked Igor Kalyapin in front of Grozny-City hotel: the attackers were throwing eggs, flour, cake, poured brilliant green over him and hit several times.
According to Kalyapin, prior to the attack he was evicted from the hotel by the man who introduced himself as its General Director.
– The director told me that since I was criticizing the Head of Chechnya and the Chechen police, and he was very fond of Ramzan Akhmatovich, I should leave the hotel immediately, – Igor Kalyapin wrote on his page.
On the same evening Igor Kalyapin applied with a crime report to the police dispatch center of the Department of the Interior for Grozny. In ten days time, on 26 March 2016 the first refusal to initiate criminal proceedings was issued by the investigators – the Ministry of the Interior investigators claimed that there was no element of crime in what happened to Mr Kalyapin. By the present time seven more refusals of this sort have been issued, the last one is dated 14 January of this year.
As it is follows from the materials of the check, the Ministry of the Interior investigators failed to perform a lot of verification activities, including the ones, prescribed by the Prosecutor’s Office back on 25 April: Grozny-City hotel guests record manual was not seized; journalists who were with Igor Kalyapin at the moment of the attack were not questioned; other witnesses of the attack were not established or questioned; the person who introduced himself as the hotel General Director and evicted Kalyapin was not identified; the police officers who were on duty providing security that evening at the complex of high-scrapers including Grozny-City hotel were not identified or questioned, and etc.
In the course of the examination of the materials of the check it turned out that none of the questioned hotel employees, including the security personnel, saw the attack or anything else unusual whatsoever that evening. The general director of the hotel explained to the investigator that he left work at 6 p.m. and returned back only after 9 p.m., because he was informed of the police officers’ arrival. The five-star hotel employees responded to the investigator’s request concerning the video tapes from the CCTV cameras saying that monitoring is performed in online mode and no records are kept.
“For several reasons we cannot agree with the investigators who do not want to qualify the attack on Igor Kalyapin under Article “Hooliganism”: first of all, it involved obviously planned and organized actions of unidentified persons committed in the public place in presence of a large number of people, and these actions definitely violated public order and expressed open disrespect to the society; secondly, it was an attack on the public figure committed on grounds of ideological hatred, which is clearly shown by the attackers’ outcries claiming that “Kalyapin is protecting terrorists”, – lawyer of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture Timur Rakhmatullin emphasizes.
Apart from lodging a complaint against the eighth refusal to initiate criminal proceedings with the Prosecutor’s Office, Igor Kalyapin applied to the Directorate of the Interior of Russia for Grozny requesting to bring to disciplinary action the police officers who negligently treated their duties and repeatedly passed illegal refusals to initiate criminal proceedings, without performing necessary verification activities.