Sergei Savelyev: ‘I was always scared’: inmate who exposed systemic Russian prisoner abuse

By Dilip -

The videos from the Russian prison hospital are almost too horrific to describe. In the worst, the victims are tied down while other inmates rape or penetrate them with metal objects, the screams and abuse recorded in bodycam footage that was later used as blackmail. Sergey Savelyev says he spent two of his years as an inmate secretly copying hundreds of videos of rape and other abuse, taking them from an internal network in a prison hospital that activists call one of the country’s most notorious torture chambers.

Prisoners rights network

“I was always scared,” he said in an interview from France, where he has requested asylum. “If I ever talked about what I was doing, I wouldn’t be talking to you today.” During his release from prison earlier this year, he retrieved a two-terabyte hard disk with hundreds of copied videos and other documents in an operation he called “extremely risky, the most dangerous moment”.

But the truth is that he was always in peril and still is. That is why Savelyev has gone public as the source of probably the most explosive leak of secret videos and files in the history of the Russian prison system.

“As long as I was anonymous but the security services knew my identity, my physical liquidation wouldn’t have caused any commotion,” he said. “Now it is much harder [to kill] me.”….

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/08/i-was-always-scared-inmate-who-exposed-systemic-russian-prisoner-abuse


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