MEASURE AGAINST EXTREME

A district police officer was convicted in connection with the Blagoveshchensk purges

Last week, in the Bashkir Blagoveshchensk, the first verdict was held in the case of the December purge last year, when the police and riot police created a filter point and happily filtered out (illegally detained, beat, abused) almost a thousand people, several hundred of whom were injured.

However, this is not the case at all. The verdict was passed against a typical “switchman” - a district police officer, who had worked in this position for about three months at the time of the events, whose guilt in this story consisted of very little: after the “special operation” he went from house to house and took refusal statements from the victims, where they they wrote that, for example, they themselves fell, but no one beat them (Article 285, part 1). As a result, district police officer Sultanov entered false testimony into the papers to refuse to initiate a criminal case against his fellow police officers (Article 292). That is, he did a good job of helping the big police brass cover up his tracks - naturally, at the command of this brass.

One cannot leave with the feeling that the fuss raised in the official media about Sultanov’s verdict, and the verdict itself, is candy to divert public eyes from the main process of the December purge, when those who directly supervised the “filtration” should end up in the dock ( head of the GROVD Ramazanov), and those who maimed people. This main process was supposed to begin in Blagoveshchensk on September 14, but it is being delayed in every possible way, and it is already known that the next hearing, with difficulty scheduled for October 12, will not take place again “for technical reasons.”

So in the coming October, you should be especially wary of judicial surrogates - there is every chance of not understanding the real thing. Because on the 7th there is another deception hearing in the Blagoveshchensk court against another “switchman”, district police officer Vasily Zhukov (the corpus delicti is the same as that of Sultanov). Be careful when they “feed” you this.

Anna POLITKOVSKAYA, Novaya columnist

03.10.2005