Ihor Indilo, like so many young people, went for celebratory drinking with a friend on the eve of his 20th birthday.
Indilo, a healthy, well-liked student, didn’t live to his birthday the next day. He was killed, many allege, while in police custody. The death – called a murder by Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman – has sparked protests nationally and renewed international attention to Ukraine’s long history of police brutality.
Here is what is known so far:
The fourth-year student at a Kyiv teacher training college quarreled with an elderly dormitory staffer on the evening of May 17. She complained to the police officer in residence, who took Indilo to Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky district police station.
Several hours later, he was dead, lying in a detention cell in a pool of vomit with a smashed-in head.
A four-minute long 1+1 TV report on May 26 sparked public outrage, leading state prosecutors on May 28 to open a criminal investigation into whether police had “exceeded their authority.”
President Viktor Yanukovych put himself in charge of the case the same day. Interior Minister Anatoly Mohilev immediately suspended the chief of the Kyiv district police station.
Civic activists, meanwhile, began organizing a nationwide protest campaign against police brutality, staging the first wave of student demonstrations on June 1 in over a dozen cities, including Kyiv.
What actually happened to Indilo in police custody is still unclear.
Police summoned his mother, Lyudmyla, from a village in Chernihiv Oblast, on May 18 to claim his corpse, saying her son had died by asphyxiation.
“But when we arrived at the morgue, they gave us the medical examiner’s report, which said he died from a head wound and fractured skull ‘sustained from a blunt object,’” Lyudmyla Indilo told 1+1 journalists, reading from the medical examiner’s report. “They wouldn’t let us look at his body at the morgue. They said: ‘Claim the body first, and then you can inspect him all you like.’”
On June 1, Kyiv Police Chief Olexiy Krykun told lawmakers in parliament that Indilo died of self-inflicted injuries seven hours after arriving shortly before 9 p.m. at the police station.
“He collapsed. I repeat: He fell down,” Krykun said, adding that Indilo was drunk and swore at the police and medical workers, who refused to take him to the hospital.
The description of Indilo’s behavior given by the police greatly puzzled his teacher and classmates.
“He was a nice and non-confrontational lad. He never scuffled with other guys,” Valentyna Kondratieva, his college teacher said. “I can’t believe he was behaving as rudely as they say.”
Others at Makarenko Professional Pedagogical College had similar assessments.
One dormitory roommate said: “Instead of protecting us from danger, the cop turned out to be an accessory to murder.”
The disputed police version is this:
Shortly after 10 p.m., Indilo was put into a cell with two other detainees. At 4 a.m., he fell asleep on a bench. Forty minutes later, according to Krykun, Indilo fell off the bench and choked on his vomit. “The police officer on duty called the ambulance … they arrived and provided medical care … there was a pool of vomit next to him,” Krykun, Kyiv’s police chief, said.
Krykun, however, failed to shed light on what had happened in Indilo’s cell between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Indilo’s classmates residing at the same dorm say the dormitory door lady, Tetyana Storozhuk, requested the policeman bring Indilo back.
The policeman returned to the precinct at approximately 1 a.m., but came back alone.
“He said Indilo was still acting up and would be in prison for at least two more days,” the door lady, Storozhuk said.
Interior Minister Anatoliy Mohilev on May 28 suspended the chief of Shevchenkovskiy district police station, Petro Miroshnychenko, the policeman who brought him to the police station and the precinct officers on duty that night pending the result of an internal police investigation and the criminal investigation launched by Kyiv prosecutors.
Ukrainian human rights ombudsman, Nina Karpacheva, told Deutsche Welle radio on June 1 that Indilo was murdered.
“This is the second time in the last several months a student held in the Shevchenkivsky police precinct has been murdered. We are still dealing with the first case, which I have urged Mohilev to investigate fairly, transparently and objectively. This is important because the police are once again trying to cover up for their colleagues,” Karpacheva said on June 1.
“Top-ranking officers of the Shevchenkivsky precinct bear full responsibility for all the human rights violations committed there,” Karpacheva said. “They should be fired, not suspended.”
The Shevchenkivsky precinct has a bad reputation in Kyiv, known as a place where police officers apply torture and unsanctioned methods of interaction with detainees, human rights activists and lawyers said.
While allegations of police brutality and torture are common in Ukraine, police officers are rarely convicted and sent to jail.
“I think that if they don’t bring charges against the suspended police officers within a week from now, they will never do it,” Oleh Veremeyenko, an attorney who has investigated several claims of police abuse. “But unfortunately I can tell from my experience, only in one in 10 cases police personnel are found guilty on criminal charges.”
Several hundred students carrying placards, reading “FASCIST,” “Too many police, too little Justice” and “Gestapo,” gathered in front of the Shevchenkivskiy police precinct on June 1. Protest organizers vowed to return in greater numbers if the police responsible for Indilo’s death were not identified within a week.
Mykhailo Kamenev, one of dozens of young activists who organized the protests across Ukraine on June 1, said he and his colleagues would meet on the Internet and in person during the upcoming days to plan their next steps. “The protests will grow in scale and scope until those responsible for Indilo’s death are brought to justice,” he said.
Kyiv Post staff writers Olesia Oleshko can be reached at [email protected] and Peter Byrne at [email protected].
