IRKUTSK, Russia -- Five former officials at a Siberian penitentiary have been handed prison terms in a high-profile case involving the torture and rape of an inmate from the Republic of Tyva.
Human rights activist Dmitry Dmitriyev told RFE/RL on August 21 that the Irkutsk regional court sentenced Maksim Volf, the former chief of the operative department of the city's detention center No. 1, to five years in prison, and his former subordinates Andrei Melentyev, Maksim Danchinov, Yevgeny Shadayev, and Andrei Moskvitin, to four years in prison each on charges of abuse of power.
Dmitriyev added that the sentences, handed down during a closed-door trial, will be appealed because they were seen as "too lenient."
The five men were arrested in March 2021 along with the former warden of the IK-6 penal colony in Irkutsk, Aleksei Agapov, and his former subordinates Aleksandr Mednikov and Anton Yerokhin.
Agapov, Mednikov, and Yerokhin were sentenced to five years in prison each in February on the same charge after a court in Irkutsk found them guilty of involvement in the separate beating, torture, and rape of an inmate with Central Asian roots in January 2021.
Three probes were launched in the region in late May into allegations of the torture and rape of three inmates -- Kezhik Ondar, Tahirjon Bakiev, and Yevgeny Yurchenko -- while they were held in detention centers in Irkutsk and the nearby city of Angarsk.
In April 2020, inmates at Correction Colony no. 15 in Angarsk staged a large riot protesting what they claimed were incidents of torture.
After the riot, many of the inmates were transferred to other prisons in the region.
Human rights groups have cited some of the inmates as saying that they faced beatings and torture after they were transferred to other prisons, where guards used other inmates who agreed "to cooperate" with the administration to force them to confess to organizing the riot.
In May, courts in Irkutsk sentenced several inmates who agreed "to cooperate" with the guards to prison terms of between five and eleven years on charges of rape, premeditated HIV infection, and inflicting serious bodily damage.