The Kuibyshevsky District Court of Irkutsk sentenced five prisoners who beat other convicts and used sexualized violence against them to terms of up to 11 years in a colony. This is reported by Sibir.Realii with reference to the lawyer Dmitry Dmitriev.
The court sentenced the accused Kurbatov and Gagarin to 11 years in a strict regime colony, and the convicted Slavgorodsky, Nepomnyashchikh and Olennikov to 10 years in prison.
All five were found guilty of sexualized violence (Article 132 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm (Article 111 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). In addition to prison terms, the court exacted 500,000 rubles from all the convicts.
Torture and sexualized violence against convicts in Irkutsk colonies and pre-trial detention centers became known at the beginning of 2021, when the department of the Investigative Committee for the Irkutsk region opened a criminal case on sexual violence against Kezhik Ondar, a prisoner in Irkutsk SIZO-1. According to Ondar’s sister, her brother was placed in a “press hut” where his cellmates “beat, tortured, mocked him, kept him tied for days, mutilated his penis, put a boiler in the anus, and it exploded in it.”
At the same time, Yevgeny Yurchenko, who was released, spoke about torture in Irkutsk prisons. He told how more than 30 people from IK-15 were sent to the Angarsk SIZO-6, where they were raped and tortured. According to Yurchenko, he “was tied to a hanger by hand, and the current was attached to the genitals, in short. All of them were raped to the last.”
Another case of torture and beatings of a prisoner became known on March 6, when 37-year-old prisoner Yevgeny Rylsky was hospitalized from penal colony No. 15 of Angarsk in the Irkutsk region after a severe beating. As it turned out during the examination, the man was beaten and for more than three or four days he lay in a serious condition in the cell. The next day after hospitalization, Rylsky died of injuries in the prison hospital IK-6.
In December 2021, Vladimir Putin acknowledged that there is a problem of torture in prisons and colonies in Russia. This topic began to be widely discussed after an informant for the human rights project Gulagu.net, a former prisoner, was able to take out of Russia a large archive of videos of torture of prisoners in several institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service, prisons and colonies. The 200 gigabyte archive contained evidence of torture in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, committed between 2016 and 2019, as well as from Transbaikalia, Saratov Region, Primorsky Territory and other regions.
A month earlier, Putin fired Alexander Kalashnikov, director of the Federal Penitentiary Service. According to Olga Romanova, the head of the Rus’ Sedentary organization, Kalashnikov was not forgiven for leaking information about torture.
