Prison riot gone wild

Prisoners in five colonies went on a hunger strike, LifeNews reports. By this they show solidarity with the prisoners from IK-6 in Kopeisk, who have been rioting for the second day. In IK-6, a thousand people are already on hunger strike, demanding the release of all prisoners in the punishment cell and an immediate meeting with the prosecutor. They seized a tower in an industrial zone and refuse to return to the detachments. The Federal Penitentiary Service states that the situation is under control, but human rights activists have still not been allowed to see the convicts.

On Saturday morning, people began to arrive at colony IK-6 - it was official parents' day in the zone. Many relatives came to the meeting from other cities, but never saw their relatives: the leadership of the Federal Penitentiary Service announced that the day of visits was canceled, and prisoners appeared on the tower with banners saying “People, help!”

Photo: RIA Novosti

But the relatives did not disperse. Onlookers also joined in. By evening, about 400 people had gathered. The more people came, the more riot police officers arrived. “During the day, the riot police behaved very quietly. Those gathered threw snarls at them, rocked police cars. They watched this in silence,” says Oksana Trufanova from the human rights organization Gulagu.net. Meanwhile, about 10 prisoners in the zone climbed onto a tower with a banner “People, help!” and shouted: “Save me, they’re torturing me!”

Accounts differ about what happened next. According to Trufanova, after midnight, the riot police suddenly began to violently disperse people: “The meat grinder began. They hit me on the head from behind with a baton, and I fell to the ground. “Do you even know who you’re beating?” I shouted to the riot policeman. And he answered me. : “If you blather, I’ll hit you even harder.”

Vyacheslav Tomchik, driving past the colony in his car, did not at first understand what was happening. “We were driving along the road past IK-6 with a friend around midnight. We looked - there was some kind of gathering there. Well, we sat, waiting for it to clear up. Then riot police came up to us - first they beat us with batons, then they opened the doors and started hitting us on the head,” - he recalls. Behind Tomczyk there was another car in which a young couple with a child was sitting. According to him, riot police officers broke the window of their car. “And so they beat us and ran away. And we, taken aback, went to the “trauma.”

Maxim Babin, Deputy Commissioner for Human Rights of the Chelyabinsk Region, who was not on site at night, has other information: “At night, hooligans drove up to the colony and began throwing bottles, including at law enforcement officers. Two employees were injured.” According to official data, 26 people were detained.

Rumors are circulating around the city that 20 bodies were received at the morgue at night, and that six prisoners escaped from the zone during the riot. There is no way to confirm or refute these rumors now - they don’t answer the phone either in the colony or in the morgue.

According to Babin’s most recent data, the colony is now calm: “The relatives who are still standing near the colony are approached by FSIN officers. They find out from those gathered the names of their imprisoned relatives and give detailed information about each prisoner so that people do not worry. Now there are about 20 people here. People come up and leave. No illegal measures are being taken against the convicts themselves, who are standing on the street in the zone.” As for the demands of the prisoners to release their cellmates from the punishment cell, Babin said that they are illegal, and therefore the administration of the FSIN “will not conduct a conversation on this issue at all. As for everything else, this is the work of the prosecutor’s office. A thorough check will be carried out on all collected materials.” .

The reason for the cancellation of the parent’s day was published on the website of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia for the Chelyabinsk region: “On November 24, 2012 at 11:30 in IK-6 (Kopeisk, maximum security) before lunch, convicts from six detachments, numbering 250 people, went out into the high-security residential corridor zone of the institution and put forward illegal demands to weaken the regime of detention, in particular, the release of a number of convicts from the punishment cell, placed there for violations of internal regulations. The convicts did not put forward any other demands, there were no negative manifestations on their part.”

According to the relatives of the victims, there is something to check in this colony. Thus, the mother of one of the prisoners in IK-6, who asked not to give her name for the safety of her son, says that those who want to live in peace in this zone should pay for this to the head of the IK, Denis Sergeevich Mekhanov. “This is what they call “money for a good life.” Those who don’t pay are sent to the basement as punishment. People sometimes live there for up to a year. My son usually pays. When he didn’t pay once, he also ended up in the basement,” she says . But he doesn’t tell his mother everything that happens to him, he explained to her this way: “While I’m in this colony, I can’t tell everything.” She cannot find out what is happening to her son now - no one answers the phone in the colony. “The last time I spoke with my son was on Thursday. We had a video conference. And then he said that everything was fine. We have such a secret code with him: if everything is fine, he responds to “How are you?” - “Everything is fine.” , if he has problems, he answers: “Yes, so.” And on Thursday he told me: “It’s normal.”

The son of Fyodor Terekhin, Evgeniy, has been in prison at IK-6 since 2008, and will serve until 2015. “At first, everything seemed to be fine. But then, from 2010, they began to bully him. How exactly they bully him, I myself cannot say - my son says very little in phone calls, he only says that he doesn’t get out of the punishment cell.” Fyodor Terekhin wrote several letters addressed to Turbanov, the head of the GUFSIN in the Chelyabinsk region, with a request to transfer his son to another colony, closer to Magnitogorsk, where he himself lives, but he always received the same answer: “No, because it’s not supposed to.”