You're reading: Police torture in Russia causes public outrage

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's top investigative agency filed new charges on March 29 against police officers accused of torturing detainees amid growing public outrage over police brutality.

The Investigative Committee said it had charged four officers in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk in the torture death of a detainee. It also leveled new accusations against a police officer in the Volga River city of Kazan who is already in custody on charges of torturing a man to death.

Kazan resident Sergei Nazarov died earlier this month of injuries suffered when police officers sodomized him with a champagne bottle. His case has caused outrage across Russia and drawn calls for an urgent overhaul of a force long accused of corruption and brutality.

Victims and human rights activists say Russian police routinely use torture to extract false confessions from those they arbitrarily round up. They say even police reforms undertaken by President Dmitry Medvedev have failed to stop or even contain police crimes and achieved little beyond changing the force’s

Police regulations still require officers to report a certain quota of solved crimes, a practice that encourages police to make arbitrary arrests and extract false confessions to make their numbers.

In the Kazan case, officers rounded up the 52-year-old Nazarov on charges of stealing a cellphone. He died at a local hospital two days later of a ruptured rectum.

His death sparked street protests in Kazan that attracted nationwide attention and led to a federal probe. The investigators arrested five police officers accused of torturing Nazarov, and the entire precinct was disbanded.

Local residents then began lining up to tell federal investigators their stories of torture by police officers.

As the police torture scandal in Kazan escalated, investigators have revealed other cases of torture across Russia that previously had been hushed up or gone unreported.

The four officers charged in Novokuznetsk were accused of causing a detainee’s death by asphyxiation by putting a gas mask on him and cutting off the access to air — a torture technique popular among Russian police, according to rights groups. In another case in the same region of Siberia, two officers were accused of torturing a detainee to death in a garage and then throwing his body out on a road.

Activists have urged the Kremlin to change regulations that encourage police brutality, oust Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, conduct a thorough cleansing of the police force and set up a separate independent body to would investigate police crimes.