A criminal case has been initiated against employees of “Matrosskaya Tishyna”.

A criminal case has been opened against four employees of the capital “Matrosskaya Tishina” detention center for “exceeding official authority with the use of violence or the threat of its use”, reports the TASS agency with reference to the press service of the FSIN office in Moscow.

According to the department’s statement, the case was initiated after “inspections and operative-investigative measures conducted by the internal security department of the FSIN and the “M” department of the FSB of Russia.” As victims, whose rights were “substantially violated”, the materials list five people. All of them are in “Matrosskaya Tishina” in the status of arrested, however, their names, as well as the names of the accused employees of the pre-trial detention center, are not disclosed.

• “Matrosskaya tishina” is the unofficial name of investigative detention facility No. 1 of the FSIN administration in Moscow, one of the oldest and most famous pre-trial detention centers in Russia. It contains about two thousand suspects, accused and convicted in criminal cases.
• In November 2009, auditor Sergei Magnitsky, who claimed to have uncovered a corrupt scheme to withdraw funds from the Russian budget, died in “Matrosskaya Tishina”. His colleagues and human rights defenders believe that the auditor was persecuted solely for political reasons and that the SIZO staff actually deliberately brought him to death. The Russian authorities did not admit their guilt in the death of Magnitsky, none of the FSIN representatives was punished.
• In 2012, the US authorities adopted the “Magnitsky Act”, which allows the introduction of personal sanctions against Russians involved in human rights violations. Since then, dozens of Russian officials, judges and employees of law enforcement agencies, including the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Alexander Bastrykin, and the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, have been included in the “Magnitsky list”.