The witness in the “Tyumen case” left Russia because of threats to the police

The witness in the so-called “Tyumen case” Leonid Bondarenko left Russia after threats from police officers, who promised to open a criminal case against him for financing a terrorist organization. He told the editors of Sibir.Realii about this.

According to him, in August police officers broke into his apartment in Surgut and searched it. Earlier, Bondarenko was detained in May 2023. After the search, he was detained. “In the department, they threatened to announce some KTO (counter-terrorist operation) and shoot me through the door, asked about who leads the support group and threatened a criminal case for the fact that I allegedly transferred money to lawyers for the defendants in the case,” he says Bondarenko.

Flash drives, a camera, a computer and bank cards were confiscated from Bondarenko. He claims that the police threatened and insulted him. An employee of the Department for Countering Extremism met with Bondarenko, who also threatened him and said that “if the Family said that someone is a terrorist, then he is a terrorist and they cannot help him.”

Only during the interrogation of the FSB officer did Bondarenko learn that the search and his detention were conducted to find the belongings of Nikita Oleinyk and his alleged accomplice Roman Paklin, as well as evidence against them.

• The accused in the “Tyumen case” have been in pre-trial detention center since August 2022. Denys Aydin and Kirill Bryk from Tyumen were the first to be detained – they were found to have about 300 grams of homemade saltpeter explosives with detonators. Later, Nikita Oleinyk and Roman Paklin from Surgut, Danylo Chertykov and Yury Neznamov from Yekaterinburg were arrested. All the accused claimed torture with electric current and beatings. After spending months in prison, Brik made a deal with the investigation and pleaded guilty. The FSB and the investigative committee do not comment on the progress of the investigation of the “Tyumen case”, it is only known that according to the investigator, the accused wanted to blow up the Tyumen thermal power plant.
• The investigation also believes that the “terrorist society” was created by Nikita Oleynyk with the goal of “overthrow the current state regime.”
• Paklin, among other things, said that after being tortured with electric current, his heart began to hurt and his left arm went numb, and at the end of November he complained of a worsening of his health. In mid-November, the Directorate of the Investigative Committee for the Tyumen region refused to open a criminal case on the fact of Neznamov’s torture.