Kyrgyzstan: the court acquitted the police officers accused of torturing
On June 14, the Sverdlovskiy District court of the capital acquitted three operatives of the Department of Internal Affairs of Alamudun district which were accused of torture. The judge explained his decision by the absence of corpus delicti. This was announced by the public foundation “Voice of Freedom”.
It’s known from the materials of the case that three operatives were accused of torture against Maksat Balbaev and his common-law wife.
The man was arrested in December 2014 on suspicion of the murder of his relative and sentenced to 23 years in prison. At first, the man confessed to the crime, but later he retracted his initial testimony. According to him, the confession was knocked out of him, about that he wrote in his statement to the Prosecutor’s Office of Alamudun district.
“They turned on the TV at full volume and beat me with police rubber truncheons, put a plastic bag over my head, after putting a gag in my mouth. They threatened to rape my wife, who at that time was sitting in the next room. Having heard the voice of the crying wife on the phone, I agreed to sign a confession,” Maksat Balbaev said in his statement.
According to the victim’s lawyer, the defense has irrefutable evidence of torture against Balbaev. Despite this, the court issued acquittals to the three operatives, justifying this decision by the absence of corpus delicti.
“He was detained on December 10 at 10.00, and the first investigative actions took place already at 22.00. The next day, Balbaev was taken to a reproduction of the circumstances of the murder in the presence of a private lawyer, who, even without being present at the first interrogation, signed the protocol stating that he had familiarized himself with the confession. Immediately after the family changed the lawyer, he, seeing the traces of beatings on the body of his client, made him sent to the Chui Regional Hospital for testing,” the lawyer of the victim Almagul Turdumambetova restores the chronology of events.
“There were still a lot of oddities in this case,” she said. “The first analysis showed blood in the victim’s urine, and when a second study was carried out immediately, everything was ok. At the same time, doctors of the Chui Regional Hospital, a forensic medical expert, and later doctors of a medical institution at the pre-trial detention center №1 recorded bodily injuries, hematomas and a brain concussion. Three times the pre-trial detention center in Bishkek refused to accept the investigated person; the fact of beating was obvious. And when they did, they indicated in the documents the presence of beatings on the body of the person under investigation.
“I was amazed at how long the torture trial was. The investigation lasted for about two years. In the Sverdlovsk District court, the judges were changed five times, the court hearings were endlessly postponed. At the penultimate court session, when the verdict was to be announced, one of the accused didn’t appear, allegedly due to illness. At the same time, he has provided a medical certificate only today. As for the verdict, we heard only its operative part. On what basis and why such a verdict was made is unclear. Of course, we hoped to the last for a fair verdict, but, unfortunately, we were unable to achieve justice,” the lawyer commented on the outcome of the case.
Almagul Turdumambetova said that they don’t agree with the court’s decision and intend to appeal to a higher authority.
“We believe that this verdict is absolutely unjust and is constructed without taking into account real evidence. The loyal attitude of judge Kadyrkulova to the defendants, the failure to take action against them is forming one logical chain,” added Balbaev’s lawyer Baktybek Zhumashev.
