You're reading: BBC: Russian outcry over prison brutality video

BBC: Russian outcry over prison brutality video

By BBC.

Published July 30, 2018 at 11:53 am

A man holds a placard reading "Stop torture, Freedom for Dadin" as he pickets Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service headquarters in Moscow on November 1, 2016.A Russian activist jailed for staging solo anti-government protests claimed in a letter published on November 1 that he was beaten and threatened with rape and murder in prison. Ildar Dadin, a 34-year-old activist serving a two-and-a-half year sentence at a prison in Russia's northwestern region of Karelia, was the first person to be imprisoned under a new law that punishes repeated participation in unsanctioned rallies with jail time. In a letter to his wife published on Meduza, an independent Russian news portal based in Latvia, Dadin said that on the second day of his detention in September, the prison governor and three other employees came to his cell and began beating him.

Photo by AFP

Handcuffed and helpless, Yevgeny Makarov is held face down on a desk as more than a dozen prison officers take it in turn to beat him.

They punch the soles of his feet first, then thrash them with truncheons.

This is no frenzied, spontaneous attack. The methods are calculated to cause maximum pain.