Kazakhstan: prison staff broke both legs and arm of the convict
Prisoner Mikhail Demkin, who is serving his sentence in the colony-settlement ES-164/4, in Zarechny (a village in the Almaty region) paid dearly for going on a spree.
The story of Mikhail Demkin was told by the director of the National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) against torture in the North Kazakhstan region, Alexander Danchev. According to him, on July 25, prisoner Demkin asked the head of the colony for three hours to go to the city of Kapchagai to the post office for a salary. But instead of Kapchagai, Demkin went to Almaty, where he met his wife Alesya Chablina. The spouses had a huge fight and Demkin left, but he didn’t come back to the colony. On July 28, he contacted Chablina himself.
“Mikhail called Alesya, they met and discussed the problem,” says Danchev. – But instead of immediately returning to the institution, they spent time together. On July 30, Chablina called Rashid Nasirdinovich, an operative of the LA-155/12 institution – due to a shortage of staff in ES-164/4, he was dealing with the issue of “returning” the convict to the colony. Chablina told him where to drive.
As Demkin himself says, he hid and watched the meeting of his wife with the colony staff from the outside.
“I did not run away from them, but when they saw me, they began to beat me. They beat me until my wife ran up and started screaming. They broke my arm and both legs. In total, doctors at the Kapchagai city hospital recorded four fractures. After that, they brought me to the institution, where the head began to threaten me, and told me to write a statement that on July 27 I jumped out from the second floor at 01:15 am and ran away. But I refused this testimony. They still threaten me and demand that I sign the testimony. In return, they promise to take me to the hospital and put me in a plaster cast. They even promise to give tramadol. That’s how they threaten me, they ask me to slander myself. Some convicts can confirm my words, as well as my wife who can confirm that since the 25th I have been absent from the “collective farm” (in the institution), “says Demkin in his video message.
According to Danchev, tired of the pressure, Mikhail Demkin tried to hang himself. In his dying letter, he spoke about the facts of pressure on him. However, he failed to accomplish his plan.
“On August 15, Mikhail called his wife and said that he would be transferred to a pre-trial detention center and returned to a colony with stricter conditions of detention. He has already served 2.2 years, there is only one year left, ”Danchev sums up, adding that Alesia Chablina was forced to turn to the Human Rights Ombudsman with a request to help and protect her husband’s rights.
