Andrew Roth - Beaten, not broken: the Russian ex-inmate covering the torture trial of former jailers
Ruslan Vakhapov
recognised all the prison guards on trial last month for the brutal torture of
an inmate in a Yaroslavl prison. They used to be his jailers too. Now free, the former
inmate has turned activist, and said he had come to report from one of Russia’s
most important prison torture cases in the past decade. His testimony to the
Public Verdict Foundation, a Russian human rights NGO, about the brutality meted
out inside the prison was later backed up by a 10-minute video of an inmate,
Evgeny Makarov, being slowly beaten unconsciousness.
“I know all these men,
I know them all well,” Vakhapov said in a phone interview from Yaroslav, where
he is following, as a representative of Public Verdict, the trial of those
accused of beating Makarov. “Who did what, who beats prisoners, who doesn’t.
During five and a half years inside, you learn these things.”
Vakhapov had already
made a name for himself as a whistleblower against rough treatment before he
arrived at Yaroslavl’s IK-1, a correctional facility an investigation into
which has led to six officers being arrested and further 17 suspended, as well
as a senior prison official saying he was “ashamed” of their conduct. Vakhapov, a father of
two, was a driver for a company in Yaroslavl when he was arrested after
stopping to relieve himself on a roadside. He was charged with exposing himself
to minors because there were children nearby.
He said he was
railroaded into accepting a sentence of seven years in prison, during which he
was beaten in another prison in the city of Rybinsk and had complained publicly
to the Russian prosecutor through a lawyer for Public Verdict, Irina Biryukova. After that, he said,
guards at IK-1 were afraid to treat him harshly. Biryukova has since fled Russia after receiving
death threats connected to the Makarov case… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/13/beaten-ex-russian-inmate-covers-torture-trial-of-former-jailers-prison