55-year-old Yunus Masharipov has told a Russian-controlled court in Yalta that he was tortured into ‘confessing’ on the video to crimes he never committed. It is not the first time he has retracted an array of absurd ‘confessions’ which may be one of the reasons why this new trial is taking place behind closed doors. Other revelations are equally damning since Masharipov and his lawyer Alexei Ladin can point to a lot of falsified evidence, and two FSB officers, appearing as witnesses for the prosecution, in court contradicted their own earlier written testimony.

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