The Central District Court of Orenburg acquitted three police officers in the case of beating a detainee. According to investigators, Evgeny Strelkov, Aset Kulkushev and Danila Nikulshin, detectives of police department No. 2 of the Orenburg inter-municipal department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Orenburg region, exceeded their official powers in order to improve the crime detection rate. However, the prosecution failed to prove this in court.
As stated in the materials of the criminal case, on October 4, 2021, in Orenburg, police officers came to the home of 18-year-old Gennady Shvetsov, detained the young man and took away his phone. At the same time, law enforcement officers did not allow to call either relatives or a lawyer. Already at the police department, the victim learned that he was suspected of stealing the phone. The young man himself later stated that the guards who detained him were beaten and threatened with rape. He registered the traces of beatings in the bureau of forensic examination. When the victim’s uncle and his lawyer arrived at the department, the police released Gennady Shvetsov, reporting a “mistake”.
In court, the interests of the injured young man were represented by the lawyers of the “Team Against Torture” association (it was created instead of the Committee against Torture, entered in the register of foreign agents and later liquidated). The organization’s website says that the verdict will be appealed. According to Albina Mudarisova, head of the Orenburg branch of the Team Against Torture, “the guilt of the defendants was fully proven in the judicial investigation.”
The prosecutor asked for six and a half years in prison for police officers. The court, however, considered that there was no corpus delicti in the actions of law enforcement officers.
In January of this year, the court ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to pay compensation to victims of the actions of former police officers in the amount of 300 thousand rubles. on another incident that occurred in the region. In August 2019, residents of the village of Cherny Otrog, Orenburg Region, Roman Chikviladze and his brother Valiko Baigulov were detained. The men were accused of stealing 5 thousand rubles. their 82-year-old father. The security forces demanded that the brothers confess to the crime, and after refusing, they tied him to a chair and began to beat him with stun guns in the genital area.
A criminal case was opened against two policemen for abuse of power (part 3, paragraphs “a”, “b” of article 286 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). In 2021, the court sentenced Sergei Pavlov to three years and four months in prison, and Rinat Arslambaev to one year and eight months in a penal colony. The latter was later mitigated, replacing the unserved part of the term with a restriction of freedom. Sergei Pavlov filed a petition for parole, and after the refusal – to replace the unserved part of the sentence. According to the Team Against Torture, the court considered this premature, as the former policeman refused to apologize to the victims.