A court of appeals in Siberia has canceled the conviction of five former prison officials who were sentenced in a high-profile case involving the torture and rape of an inmate.
In August 2023, Maksim Volf, the former head of the operative department of the detention center No. 1 in Irkutsk, was handed five years in prison, while his former subordinates, Andrei Melentyev, Maksim Danchinov, Yevgeny Shadayev, and Andrei Moskvitin, were sentenced to four years in prison each for organizing the torture and rape of Kezhik Ondar, who was left disabled after the ordeal.
Ondar's lawyers said at the time that the sentences were too lenient and that they would appeal the ruling.
The Court of Appeals No. 5 in the city of Novosibirsk on April 22 sent the case back to prosecutors for additional investigation. It is not clear if the court considered the sentences too lenient or too harsh, since the whole case is now starting again from the beginning.
The five men accused of torturing Ondar were arrested in March 2021 along with the former warden of the IK-6 prison 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 2023 on the same charge after a court in Irkutsk found them guilty of involvement in the separate beating, torture, and rape of Tahirjon Bakiev, an inmate with Central Asian roots, in January 2021.
In all, three probes were launched in the Irkutsk region in late May 2022 into allegations of the torture and rape of three inmates -- Kezhik Ondar, Tahirjon Bakiev, and Yevgeny Yurchenko -- while they were held in a detention center in Irkutsk and a prison in the nearby city of Angarsk.
Bakiev died in prison in February this year, a day before a hearing that would decide financial compensation he had demanded from his abusers. The prison administration called the death a suicide, while Bakiev’s family insists he was murdered or forced to commit suicide while in custody.
In April 2020, inmates at the IK-15 prison in Angarsk started a mass riot, protesting what they claimed were incidents of torture.
Afterward, many of them were transferred to other prisons in the region.
Human rights groups have quoted 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 2022, courts in Irkutsk sentenced several inmates who agreed to "cooperate" with the guards to prison terms between five and 11 years on charges of rape, premeditated HIV infection, and inflicting serious bodily damage.