Happy Warden's Day

On March 19, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation stopped the investigation into the death of Sergei Magnitsky in the Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center. Investigation terminated due to absence of a crime event

On Tuesday, March 19, Fikret Gamdulaevich Tagiev, head of the pre-trial detention center "Matrosskaya Tishina", once again received human rights activists in his office. They came to meet with Leonid Razvozzhaev, who, after three months of wandering around the Siberian pre-trial detention center, was returned to Moscow. Fikret Tagiev has been the owner of Matrosskaya Tishina since 2003. He had people involved in high-profile cases, so the arrival of Razvozzhaev does not bother him much. The head of the pre-trial detention center has completely different concerns. “We have a person dying in the city hospital,” Tagiyev says. - He has HIV, tuberculosis, cerebral edema. He was admitted to us on February 28, and just a week ago we transferred him to a civilian hospital and set him out in convoy. Today we received papers from doctors that he needs to be released urgently, but Judge Pashevich from the Zelenograd court does not want to go to the hospital. So I'm calling Olga Alexandrovna Egorova now so that she can resolve the situation. He won't die today or tomorrow. We must release."

We ask: “Why weren’t they released earlier?”

“So he was not yet heavy enough,” Tagiev replies and continues to call the Moscow City Court. Finally dials - it seems that Judge Egorova has already given instructions to Judge Pashevich and he is ready to release the seriously ill from custody.

"Free home?" - we ask. “No, where are you going home? If he dies, he will stay in the hospital.”

And then it dawns on me why the head of the pre-trial detention center is in such a good mood: the judge will release the dying man from custody and he will die in the hospital, and not in the pre-trial detention center. This means that there will be one less "blind man's blind man" in prison statistics. Strictly speaking, Fikret Tagiyev is not to blame for the fact that, as a rule, people go free “foot first”. According to the law, seriously ill persons under investigation can be released only if they suffer from fatal diseases.

The last example: 25-year-old Margarita Charykova was recently discharged from the same Matrosskaya Tishina hospital to a regular pre-trial detention center. She has been diagnosed with a terrible diagnosis since birth - a rectovaginal fistula and atresia, that is, the absence of a rectum, and it is impossible to treat her in a pre-trial detention center. But not only did the prison doctors not really treat her, they, despite her numerous requests, refused to call a proctologist to her.

“According to the government decree, it does not pass,” Tagiyev explains. “Change the order!”

“And why don’t your prison doctors turn to the government? Why don’t they write that the list of diseases indicated in the government decree on the release of those under investigation should be expanded: people cannot be released to die, they need to be released so that they are treated in hospitals, and not in prison. What about the Hippocratic Oath? - a human rights activist from the Moscow PMC gets excited.

Fikret Tagiyev leaves her question unanswered. Every time he is asked why people die in his prison hospital, he answers: “This is a hospital, people die in hospitals.”

But what about Sergei Magnitsky, Vera Trifonova, who died in Matrosskaya Tishina under strange circumstances? Neither the investigators nor the court found anything criminal in their deaths in the pre-trial detention center.

Let me remind you that the only person accused of Magnitsky's death was Dmitry Kratov, a doctor in the Butyrka (!) Prison, who was subsequently acquitted by the court. And the surgeon at Matrosskaya Tishina Alexandra Gaus, who left Magnitsky to die in the pre-trial detention center, went to the prison hospital and returned to the patient only when she was informed that he had died, was only a witness in the case. The death of Vera Trifonova in the Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center was blamed on the civilian doctor Alexandra Artamonova, who treated her a few weeks before her death.

There were other cases of strange deaths in this pre-trial detention center. But all this is considered the normal order of things. When I asked why neither doctors nor the heads of the pre-trial detention center are ever responsible for the deaths of prisoners in prison, Vasily Aleksanyan, who suffered to the fullest in the same “Matrosskaya Tishina”, answered very simply: “If after my case there were some radical changes, then Sergei Magnitsky would still be alive. The jailers think day and night how they can get away from responsibility. Papers are molded.

They are very successful in avoiding responsibility.

The head of "Matrosskaya Tishina" seems to have turned out to be such a powerful person that, despite all the scandals, journalistic investigations, lawyers' requests, reports of state human rights activists, he is still in his place.

By the way, for some reason he was not included in the "Magnitsky list". There are also lucky ones.