“By morning all the prisoners surrendered”: details of the riot in the Kemerovo pre-trial detention center
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On the evening of August 21, in the Kemerovo pre-trial detention center No. 1, prisoners took hostage three employees, two of whom were young women. “Horror!” – you will say and you will be right. But a further terrible turn of events (as one might expect), thank God, did not happen: the rebels did not lay a finger on the jailers. Moreover, the invaders and employees were released, and they themselves surrendered.
Either the captive prisoners are insane (but then their place is in a closed mental hospital), or they found good reasons to take an extreme step (on the eve of the state of emergency, the lawyers of the inmates talked about beatings and even rape). The statement of the Kuzbass Investigative Committee that the prisoners allegedly demanded drugs and mobile phones seems to the experts … implausible.
The MK columnist looked into the causes and consequences of the high-profile incident.
On August 21, at about 20:30, three employees of the Kemerovo SIZO No. 1 (among them two women) conducted the so-called evening cell-by-cell round, or “verification”. An important point: the employees of the pre-trial detention center are young and not quite experienced – for example, the girls are 21 and 24 years old, the guy is 23.
A cell-by-cell tour implies that employees go inside, inspect the premises, and interrogate prisoners. When three young guards entered one of the cells, they could not immediately identify the threat. Two prisoners blocked the exit, the other six surrounded them in a tight ring. And then the door was locked from the inside.
And after 10 minutes, all law enforcement agencies of the Kemerovo region received a message that 8 detainees in PKU SIZO No. 1 had taken hostage employees of the institution and demanded to meet with the leadership of the Federal Penitentiary Service. Soon the invaders released 24-year-old Christina (they entered, so to speak, into a position – she urgently needed to go home), and a few more hours later – the other two employees. By morning, all the prisoners surrendered, as they say, to the best of their ability.
The Kuzbass Federal Penitentiary Service confirmed that, firstly, the employees were not injured and, secondly, that the rebels surrendered voluntarily and there was no battering ram (as some media and telegram channels wrote).
To be honest, there has never been a more calm and bloodless hostage-taking in a prison in the history of either Soviet or modern Russia. This could happen only in one case – if the prisoners had something to say at a meeting with the leadership of the Federal Penitentiary Service and it heard them.
Pre-trial detention center No. 1 has not enjoyed a good reputation among prisoners and their relatives in recent years. One of the lawyers published his appeal to the prosecutor’s office on the Kuzbass portal. I quote: “According to my trustee, from May 30, 22 to May 31, 22, violent acts occurred in cell 38 in SIZO-1 in Kemerovo. operatives responded inadequately to the curtained video camera in cell No. 38 of SIZO-1, forcibly dragged the detainees out of the cell, beat them in the offices of operational services using stun guns. At the same time, one of the detainees (my client will personally inform the prosecutor who will conduct the check) was raped with the help of a special device – a rubber truncheon.
All this happened after several dozen prisoners went on a hunger strike and opened their veins.
It is noteworthy that at the beginning of this year, Kuzbass human rights activist Dmitry Kamynin ended up in pre-trial detention center No. 1. So he says that there are press huts in the pre-trial detention center: “In the pre-trial detention center there is a torture chamber No. 35, a prisoner nicknamed Psycho (his real name is Ruslan Ch.) is in charge there. My camera is almost opposite, I sometimes hear someone being beaten, groans.”
Like it or not, the competent authorities should have looked into it, but, apparently, they did not. And relatives of prisoners talk about poor conditions of detention and how in winter their loved ones were brought from the pre-trial detention center to the court without winter shoes, with bags on their feet.
So, maybe it was all this that caused the August prison emergency? “They put forward demands to provide them with objects and substances prohibited for storage: mobile phones, drugs and cigarettes” – these are the lines from the official press release of the Kuzbass Department of the TFR.
“It looks like nonsense,” says a former employee of the Federal Penitentiary Service. “Invaders never make such demands. They usually demand money, a “corridor” and a plane to escape. Taking hostages is, in principle, almost suicidal. The stakes are very high. No one would go for broke for cigarettes, drugs and phones. Again, this is nonsense.
Why then such strange things say SK? If the press huts there are “private”, then they beat out testimony in those cases that are being handled by the investigative body. But I do not want to believe that this is so.
Newspaper headline:
Kemerovo rebellion: not senseless and not merciless?
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