Law enforcement officers in Kuban used a detainee lying down as a target for shooting

The video, in which armed men in camouflage uniforms beat Andrey Popov, a resident of the Kuban village Rogovskaya, make him crawl on his knees, and shoot him in the back with blank cartridges for the sake of intimidation, was published by the Committee Against Torture (CAT).

On March 17, Popov filed a statement about the torture applied to him. According to the applicant, when on 10 March, together with a friend, he came to his friend's house in the village of Kalininskaya, the security forces attacked him.

“They laid me and the others face down on the ground and started hitting me in the head, body, arms and legs. The main blows were in the area of the kidneys and head. At the same time, butts from machine guns were used, which were used to strike blows in the back. They also fired blank cartridges in the back, threatening to shoot at the same time”, - Popov’s story is quoted by the checkpoint.

The recording shows how the security forces, with unjustified cruelty and force, kick the man lying on the ground with heavy boots on the head and face. When the detainee was taken to the department, the doctors recorded a bruise of the soft tissues of the face and a bruise of the kidneys on the victim.

After that, the security forces attacked the owner of the farm, Nikolay Bondarenko, demanding to say how many cows and heating boilers he had stolen. When he stated that he had not stolen anything, they began to beat him with increased cruelty. The torture stopped only after someone recognized Bondarenko as the owner of the farm.

When the police took Bondarenko to the Ministry of Internal Affairs department for the Kalininsky district, they again demanded that he confess to stealing cows and boilers. Having received a refusal, the masked security forces began to brutally beat him all over his body.

“At about five in the evening, I agreed to write a confession statement because I felt a sharp pain in the ribs. My heart also began to ache, I felt irregularities in the rhythm of my heartbeat, I was afraid that the blows to the area of the heart, which I was repeatedly inflicted, could lead to my death”, - explained the detainee Bondarenko. Only after that was he released from the department.

When Bondarenko was examined by doctors, he was diagnosed with numerous bruises, abrasions, a closed fracture of 8,9,10 ribs on the left without displacement of fragments and a contusion of the knee joint.

After examining the video recordings of the beatings after the detainees' complaints of unmotivated police brutality, the lawyers of the Committee against Torture appealed to the Investigative Committee with reports of the crime. According to their statement, a pre-investigation check has been scheduled. At the same time, social activists appealed to the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Krasnodar Territory with a demand to conduct an official check on the fact of beating people and "knocking out" confessions by shooting them in the back.

“We will seek to ensure that all law enforcement officers involved in the illegal use of physical violence are identified by the investigation and brought to justice”, - said the CAT lawyer Ilya Platonov.