The images are terrible. One video shows a man screaming in pain as he is raped with a huge red stick. In another, a group of prison guards is seen urinating on an inmate’s face. In a third, a prison officer tramples an inmate on the back while questioning him: Who are you?
And the prisoner, in the middle of the torture session, barely replied: “Nobody, a homeless man.”
It is a series of videos released by the ONG Gulagu.net, specialized in the human rights of detainees in Russia.
They were apparently recorded in a prison hospital in the Saratov region, on the Volga. According to the newspaper The country from Madrid, the images were used to blackmail inmates.
The man who managed to collect these videos is a Belarusian computer scientist detained in prison for a drug case, identified as Serguei Savelyev, 31 years old. He was in charge of the maintenance of the prison’s computers and that way he had access to the prison system’s data network. After being released from prison, he fled to France, where he requested asylum.
Moscow’s reaction to the release of videos of torture in a Volga prison
After the videos were released, the Russian authorities opened seven criminal cases for widespread abuse of prisoners, abuse of power and sexual assault.
Even the director of the Saratov prison hospital and several officials were fired. The Prison System opened its own investigation on the subject as suspicions grow that this would be a widespread practice in other prisons in the country.
What the NGO that released the videos on torture in a Russian prison said
Meanwhile, the director of Gulagu.net, Vladímir Osechkin, said to The country which has in its possession more than a thousand files from at least eight Russian regions recorded in some twenty pre-trial detention centers and male penal colonies.
And he assured: “The material proves that serious crimes are committed against the prisoners ”. And “it provides direct evidence that Russian prison staff often use violence, beat prisoners and find formal excuses to justify abuse to break the will of inmates and repress them.”
Osechkin is in exile with his family in France. The site of his NGO was blocked last July in Russia. On the page you can see some shocking images about torture sessions.
Some 483,000 people are serving time in Russia, a country of 145 million people. The prison system is based on penal colonies, where inmates must work. These colonies have contracts for the work of their prisoners with state organizations.
It is not the first time that videos of this type have been known. In 2018 there was a similar leak of images of torture in the Yaroslavl Prison, northeast of Moscow. Following a wave of national outrage, the prison bosses were acquitted. Most of the 11 convicted officers were released on parole.
Why do prison guards film torture sessions
One thing that is striking is that the penitentiaries record the torture applied to the prisoners. The explanation is simple: “It is not just about the torture itself, but also that the officials blackmail abused prisoners by divulging that information,” said Osechkin.
And he explained: “In the Russian prison culture there is a very clear hierarchy. AND someone who has been raped or urinated on the face falls to the bottom of the ladder. Spending five or six years in that ‘lowered’ state is hell ”.
The purpose of blackmail is diverse: from recruiting the prisoner to collaborate by monitoring others or in other tasks, to economic extortion, he said. The country.
