The defence of Andrei Zakhtei who is the defendant in the “saboteur case” filed a complaint to the Sevastopol Military Court against the decision of the investigator of the Investigative Committee to refuse to open a criminal case regarding the use of torture against their client. Zakhtei’s lawyer Alexei Ladin reported about this to Crimean human rights group.
Earlier, on 12 December, 2016, Zakhtei’s defence sent a letter to the Investigative Committee (IC of the RF) addressed to the head Bastrykin A.I. a statement of torture, which was applied to the Ukrainian citizen after the detention. Then the lawyers asked Investigative Committee to check the actions of the FSS officers for abuse of power with the use of violence.
But the investigator for the most important cases of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, Marchukov R.A. refused to initiate a criminal investigation into the use of torture to Zakhtey on 5 May, 2017.
Lawyer Ladin pointed out in the complaint that this decision of the investigator is illegal and unreasonable, since the check was conducted in violation of the principles of thoroughness, completeness and objectivity.
“Thus, in the statement of the crime, it is shown all the circumstances of the application to Zakhtei A.R. of illegal methods of obtaining evidence in a criminal case, namely physical violence and torture, ” the complaint states.
According to the lawyer, medical documents of Zakhtey A.R. were attached to the application for the crime, in which injuries from the illegal use of handcuffs at the time of torture were recorded.
“Taking into account the presence of information about injuries the investigation has to conduct a forensic medical examination of bodily injuries of Zakhtei A.R. to establish the severity of the harm done to him, but this was not done by the investigator,” the defence claims in their complaint.
The defence demanded to find the decision of the investigator Marcukov R.A. from 5 May, 2017 as unlawful and oblige this investigator to eliminate the violations committed.
After the detention and the court Zakhtey was transported to an unknown room with a bag on his head. “I was beaten and tortured in this building for the next two days, I was demanded to admit that I was in a group of saboteurs who were preparing explosions in Crimea,” Andrei Zakhtei wrote in a statement on torture.
According to the website «Mediazone», referring to lawyer Ilnur Sharapov, scars that are visible to the naked eye were left on Zakhtei’s arms; they were also fixed by doctors who examined the Crimean citizen on his arrival to Simferopol pre-detention centre.
“The scars on my hands came from the fact that the FSS officers severely pulled my wrists with handcuffs,” Zakhtey explained in his statement. At the same time, when I was tortured with an electric shock, I was twitching with pain, and that’s how the marks appeared on my wrists. They were torturing me with electric current for two days. First, they fastened the terminals to the legs and to the buttocks, turned on the current, demanded to confess to the crime. I said that I was an ordinary taxi driver and came to the shooting site on the customer’s call, but they continued torturing me. Later the terminals were fitted to the genitals – from pain I lost consciousness several times.“ All this time there was a bag on his head.
By 11 August, 2016, Zakhtey, according to himself, gave all the testimonies required from him, after which he was transferred to the temporary detention facility, where he spent about a week. “From time to time I was taken to the interrogator for interrogation. In the temporary detention facility I asked for bandages from the doctors to somehow bandage the wounds so that they would not bleed.”
Ilnur Sharapov claims that these bandages are visible in the photos that journalists made during the meeting of the “Kiev District Court” of Simferopol, which arrested Zakhtei for two months on charges of preparing sabotage (Part 1 of Article 30 and Part 2 of Article 281 of the Criminal Code).
