Watchdog: TikToker Nekoglai beaten up in Moscow police department ahead of deportation

TikToker Nekoglai (Nikolay Lebedev) was battered in a Moscow police department before he was sent to the temporary detention centre for foreigners, Secretary of the Public Supervisory Commission, watchdog overseeing rights of people in custody, Alexey Melnikov said as noted by Sota.

According to Melnikov, Nekoglai said that police officers were recording his ordeal.

Watchdog representatives arrived in the detention centre after a video emerged online showing the blogger, bald and bruised on the face, apologising for his Russian soldier parody TikTok. However, they were not allowed in due to the fact that it was after hours.

“When we are not let in, we justly think that there are violations in the facility,” Melnikov said.

On a working day, the watchdog representatives were cleared to enter the centre. According to Melnikov, the TikToker “was clearly suffering mentally and psychologically”, while bruises and abrasions were visible on his body. The blogger said that he had been beaten up in the Moscow police office, he had also been shaved bald there.

On 7 Novembr, Nekoglai shot a parody TikTok referencing a video of a Russian soldier lying in a trench and “swatting away grenades falling on him with bare hands”. Later, head of the Safe Internet League Ekaterina Mizulina asked authorities to look into the video for signs of “discrediting the Russian army”.

The blogger, 21, was ultimately deported from Russia to his native Moldova. At the court hearing, the man with tears in his eyes said that he was not abused, that he was sorry, and asked to be “deported faster”.

Following the court decision to deport Nekoglai, teenagers en masse started recording videos that were similar in nature to the original one by the Moldovan TikToker.

They were captioning them with “How to get to Moldova?” “How many years will I get?”, etc.