A prisoner who had previously been tortured died in a colony in Irkutsk

Prisoner Tahirzhon Bakiev, who previously appeared as a victim in the case of torture against three prison employees and six prisoners, died in the Irkutsk colony number 6. Human rights activists reported his death on the Telegram channel “Zapravka 38”. According to them, Bakiev committed suicide.

The Telegram channel published a photocopy of the last letter Bakiyev sent from the colony. In it, he asks to draw attention to the torture that was applied to him. The letter ends with the words “Help, please, I can’t handle it myself anymore. I don’t want to die here with the wording, что Sam.”

On February 6, Bakieva’s sister Nargiz confirmed to the editors of Sibir.Realii his death. Today, she was called by the Federal Police Service and asked to “come and pick up the body.” The management of the colony and the authorities have not yet commented on the prisoner’s death.

In 2019, Bakiyev was sentenced to 7 years in prison on the charge of possession of weapons. Initially, he served his sentence in the hangar IK-15. In 2021, he was brutally interrogated by inmates on the orders of the colony workers. They beat Bakiev and raped him with a mop, causing serious damage to his health.

In January last year, Bakiev asked the UN, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Russian human rights defenders to protect him from the threats of jailers.

“Employees of the Irkutsk GUFSIN and the operation department of the colony constantly threatened me, put me under psychological pressure, called me a “sufferer”, tried to make me commit suicide. They said that [бывший начальник колонии] Agapov will not forgive me for this – he earned himself [звание] a lieutenant colonel, and because of me, he had a career,” says Bakiev in the letter.

Bakiev’s torture was confirmed by doctors and the ombudsman of Pryangarya, Svetlana Semenova. In the letter, the detainee writes that due to the appeal to the ombudsman, the pressure became even stronger, she herself soon stopped communicating with Bakiev, and, as he was told, she allegedly told the operatives: “Make sure he doesn’t complain.”

The defense and relatives of the victim reported that they forced him to refuse a lawyer and exerted a second pressure so that he refused to testify.

• At the beginning of February last year, the court sentenced the colony employees involved in Bakiev’s torture. The ex-head of IK-6 Alexei Agapov, the deputy head of the operational department Alexei Mednikov, and the operational commissioner Anton Erokhin were sentenced to 5 years in a general regime colony.
• In August of the same year, ex-chief of the operational department of SIZO-1 Maksym Wolff, senior operational officer Andrey Melentiev, junior inspector of the duty group Maksym Danchynov, duty assistant to the head of the detention center Yevgeny Shadaev, and FSIN employee Andrey Moskvytin were found guilty of torturing Kezhyk Ondar, a prisoner from the same colony. . For the rape of a prisoner from Tuva, who became disabled, the employees were sentenced to 4 to 5 years in prison. He himself left the colony in September of the same year.