In Almaty, a small unsanctioned rally was held near the building of the City Prosecutor’s Office. The victims and relatives of those killed and arrested during the January events came to demand a fair investigation and punish those who killed the protesters and those who tortured the detainees.
About 40 people gathered near the Prosecutor’s Office at about eight o’clock in the morning.
“Today at 8 am, our guys arrived – those who went through the most severe torture. These are the guys who shot the film “They killed us”: Kosan Makhambaev, Akylzhan Dyusebaev, Darkhan and Nurtas. They made the film themselves. And today they came to the Prosecutor’s Office and they were tied up and taken to the City Department of the Anti-Corruption Agency. They were kept in different rooms and were not allowed to leave. What are the authorities afraid of? Those four guys? What New Kazakhstan can we talk about if our guys are detained? We notified in advance that we would come here and that we would not hold a rally. We are just waiting for a response to our demands: that the dead be investigated, that the killers be found and punished, that the detainees (our innocent guys) be released,” one of the victims’ relatives told reporters.
Among those, who came to the building of the Prosecutor’s Office, weren’t only residents of Almaty and its surroundings, but also people from other regions. Realizing that they couldn’t wait for an answer from the Prosecutor’s Office, people unfurled posters with photographs of their injured and dead relatives.
According to people, only thanks to the efforts of the initiative group headed by Kosan Makhambaev, it was possible to persuade people to file complaints about torture with the Anti-Corruption Agency.
“People were intimidated and therefore didn’t file complaints. But since the end of April, they began to claim. As far as we know, over 100 complaints of torture were filed, although there were thousands of cases of torture. It’s because they are visited and intimidated, ‘Think about your still living children and don’t apply!’ Of course, people are afraid,” the participants said, once again emphasizing that the participants in the January events were ordinary citizens, not terrorists.
Meanwhile, as reported by the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights (KIBHR), new facts of torture of detainees during the January events became known. For example, the resident of Almaty Samat Nurmukhanov, who spent three months in LA-155/18 pre-trial detention center, was electrocuted, drowned, hung up by his legs and beaten, forced to write a suicide note stating that he had voluntarily committed suicide, forced to sleep on the cold floor, starved, broke fingers on both hands. After all that Nurmukhanov had endured, he became an invalid.
On May 26, the trial of Alibek Imanbekov, accused of stealing weapons from a weapons store during the January events, began at the District Court of Almaty. According to Imanbekov, he didn’t steal the weapon, but found it on the street. I tried to call the police to find out how and to whom to hand over the find, but I didn’t get through, so I hid the weapon at a friend’s barbershop. He also said that investigators forced him to write a confession about the theft of weapons under torture.
As ACCA has already reported, only the Coalition of Non-Governmental Organizations of Kazakhstan against Torture received 164 reports of torture and other types of unlawful treatment. Among those, who were tortured, were not only young men, but also women, children and old people.
