Prosecutor's Office supports rights defenders in torture case of Krasnodar resident

The Prosecutor's Office has found unjustified the investigators' refusal to initiate a case on the beating Evgeny Lastin, a detained resident of Krasnodar. Investigators had seven times rejected Lastin's claims to initiate a case; now, all these decisions have been cancelled, the head of the Committee against Torture (CaT) has informed.

Evgeny Lastin said that he had posted an ad on the website for the sale of a shaving kit. On October 30, 2020, he made an appointment with a potential buyer, but was detained, beaten up and accused of disobeying a policeman and stealing shaving kits from a store.

Over the past seven months, policemen have repeatedly changed their testimonies; their words contradict the video record of his detention, said Sergey Romanov, the head of the Krasnodar branch of the CaT.

Lastin himself believes that suspicions about the theft of shaving kits could arise with the policemen due to the fact that he had posted ads for the sale of these kits.

The "Caucasian Knot" has also reported that the residents of Krasnodar, Evgeny Baiguzin and Nadezhda Pupkova, had turned to human rights defenders for help after the court found no violations in the actions of the law enforcers, who had chained them to a pole for two hours.