The National Anti-Corruption Bureau on Aug. 15 released video footage of interrogations in which the bureau employees say they were illegally detained, beaten and even tortured by prosecutors on Aug. 12.
The bureau, which is seen as more independent, has been involved in a bitter dispute with the prosecution service, a discredited, distrusted and presidentially-controlled agency with no results to show in the corruption fight.
Larysa Sargan, a spokeswoman for Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, told the Kyiv Post that Lutsenko would release his official position on the issue when he comes back from a business trip on Aug. 17.
Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, said at a news briefing on Aug. 15 that the prosecutors had illegally broken into a safehouse where bureau employees were based.
As a result, they had to call the anti-corruption bureau’s special-force unit, which helped to release the bureau employees.
The bureau employees said the prosecutors had hit them in the ribs, necks, jaws and legs. The prosecutors also threatened to flay them and to cut out an eye with a knife, the bureau employees claimed.
One of those interrogated said that prosecutor Dmytro Sus had threatened to transport him to Russian-occupied Donbas. Sus and another prosecutor, Volodymyr Hutsulyak, head the anti-corruption department of the prosecutor’s office accused of fabricating political cases on behalf of President Petro Poroshenko’s grey cardinals, Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky.
Sytnyk said the anti-graft agency had opened a kidnapping and torture case against the prosecutors.
He said detectives of the bureau had been conducting surveillance of the prosecutors in a criminal case.
The bureau said that the surveillance fully complied with the law and had been authorized by a court.
The Ukrainska Pravda online newspaper published a photo of a sheet of paper that it said was obtained by prosecutors from detectives of the bureau. The sheet of paper read “Dmytro Sus, Audi Q7.”
The Audi Q7 car, which costs about $40,000, was not included in Sus’ 2015 declaration.
A source with knowledge of the matter told the Kyiv Post that Sus was a suspect in an unlawful enrichment case.
“This is an example of a conflict between Bankova’s puppet organization and the first independent law enforcement agency,” reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko wrote on Facebook on Aug. 13, referring to Bankova Street, where the Presidential Administration is located. “You can’t even imagine what kind of uproar will happen when they start arresting people in the cases against (ex-lawmaker Mykola) Martynenko, (lawmaker Serhiy) Pashynsky, Kononenko, the Surkis brothers and (Kononenko’s protege) Dmytro Kryuchkov.”
Sus’ version of the events was different. He told News.One on Aug. 12 that he and other prosecutors had been followed by bureau detectives and invited them to their offices.
Then the bureau’s special-force unit arrived, according to Sus.
“Four or five Ford Transit cars with fully armed people arrived, and they beat everyone here,” he claimed, adding that they had broken the prosecutors’ phones.
Sus argued that the detectives’ actions were their revenge for searches carried out by Sus’ department at the bureau earlier this month. The prosecutors then accused the bureau of illegal surveillance, while the anti-graft body said it was legal.
In a previous episode of the conflict between the anti-corruption bureau and allies of Poroshenko, the bureau caught Mykola Chaus, a judge reportedly tied to Hranovsky, with a $150,000 bribe last week.
Prior to that, the Prosecutor General’s Office had also refused to transfer cases to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
