Uzbekistan: former political prisoner Andrey Kubatin was tortured
On October 29, former political prisoner Andrey Kubatin, a well-known Uzbek orientalist-Turkologist, died of coronavirus. Before his death, he told what he did not dare to do after his release. He spent two years and five months in the detention center of the National Security Service (now the State Security Service) and was tortured all the time. It was impossible to stand it any longer, and Andrey signed a confession.
According to the sister of the late, Klara Sakharova, he was sophisticatedly bullied and beaten, and was not allowed to sleep for several days. The Uzbek security officers threatened to rape his wife and kill his child. As a result, from a nervous shock, his wife Feruza had a miscarriage. After that, she couldn’t become pregnant again. Earlier, Clara couldn’t tell about it, fearing to harm her brother.
In the National Security Service, his liver and kidneys were beaten off, his heart began to malfunction.
“They beat him professionally, trying not to leave traces outwardly,” says Klara. “The doctors, with whom I talked during the treatment of my brother, were shocked… Why were nerves of such a young guy stretched to breaking, as if he had gone through the war? How would they know?”
Klara Sakharova is a well-known civic activist. As soon as her brother was hospitalized, she did everything possible to treat him: she borrowed money to buy medicines and followed all the instructions of the doctors, without being able to control the course of treatment.
“My brother was taken to the hospital with only 10 percent of lungs damage, and in very few days, the damage was already 90 percent, the nervous system couldn’t cope with the stress,” she said.
Now it’s already difficult to explain the sudden death, the circumstances of which are incomprehensible and suspicious. The questions of Andrey’s rehabilitation remained unanswered.
Klara Sakharova told the ACCA journalist that on November 2, she applied to the Military Court, trying to find out the fate of the second application for compensation for moral and material damage. According to the activist, the judge Dilshod Tursunbaev intends to get off with a bureaucratic answer, delaying the consideration of the document.
In December 2017, Andrey Kubatin was sentenced to 11 years in prison for high treason. At the same time, the investigators of the National Security Service accused the Turkologist of revealing state secrets about the country’s mineral resources and inciting ethnic strife. Due to the falsification of evidence, in May 2018, Kubatin’s term was reduced to five years. After numerous international protests and clear evidence of the fabrication of the case, on September 26, 2019, he was acquitted.
