8 times the Ministry of Internal Affairs refused to initiate a criminal case for the attack on human rights activist Igor Kalyapin in Grozny

The first decision to refuse to initiate a criminal case into the attack was issued on March 26, 2016, 10 days after the attack on Kalyapin at the Grozny City Hotel.

The last one is dated January 14, 2017, it has already been appealed . The chairman of the “Committee for the Prevention of Torture” also appealed to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Grozny with a request to bring to disciplinary responsibility the police officers who did not carry out the necessary checks and refused to initiate a case.

The human rights organization, based on the materials of pre-investigation checks, believes that the investigators of the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not carry out the actions prescribed by the prosecutor's office.

“The electronic guest register of the Grozny City Hotel was not seized; the journalists who were with Igor Kalyapin at the time of the attack were not interviewed; other witnesses to the attack were not identified or interviewed; the identity of the man who introduced himself as the general director of the hotel and evicted Kalyapin has not been established; The police officers guarding the high-rise complex that evening, including the Grozny City Hotel, have not been identified or interviewed,” reports the Committee for the Prevention of Torture.

The workers interviewed, the human rights organization continues, testified that they did not see “neither the attack itself nor anything unusual.”

“The general director of the hotel explained to the investigator that he left work at 18:00 and returned only after 21:00, as he was informed that the police had arrived. In response to the investigator’s request for video recordings from the hotel complex’s surveillance cameras, the employees of the five-star hotel responded that the surveillance is carried out online and the recordings are not saved anywhere,” the checkpoint explains.

As the organization’s lawyer Timur Rakhmatulin noted, the “Committee” believes that it is necessary to qualify the attack on Kalyapin under Article 213 of the Criminal Code (hooliganism).

“Firstly, clearly planned and organized actions by unknown persons, committed in a public place with a large crowd of people, certainly violated public order and expressed clear disrespect for society; secondly, the attack was carried out on a public figure based on ideological hatred, as evidenced by the attackers’ cries that “Kalyapin is protecting terrorists,” he argues.

As it became known in May 2016, the prosecutor’s office considered the refusal to initiate a case of attack on Kalyapin to be illegal.

On March 16, 2016, the administrator of the Grozny City Hotel evicted a human rights activist who was staying there from the hotel, after which he was subjected to a hooligan attack. Radio Liberty journalist Anton Naumlyuk, who was in Grozny that day , reported that about 15 young men “of strong build and wearing masks” hit Kalyapin several times, and then threw eggs at him, doused him with brilliant green and sprinkled him with flour.

Kalyapin arrived in Grozny a week after on March 9, 2016, on the border of Ingushetia and Chechnya, a bus carrying was attacked the press secretary of the “Committee for the Prevention of Torture” Ivan Zhiltsov, international lawyer Ekaterina Vanslova, correspondent for the Norwegian publication Ny Tid Oystein Windstad, Lena Maria Persson Loefgren from Swedish Radio, Mediazona correspondent Yegor Skovoroda, New Times journalist Alexandrina Elagina, photographer Mikhail Solunin and ex-Kommersant employee Anton Prusakov.

Before this, in June 2015, the office of the “Committee against Torture” was destroyed in Grozny . On June 3, several hundred people gathered in the courtyard of the house where human rights activists rented an apartment, then the door was broken down, and checkpoint officers had to leave the premises through the window. The police then drove for more than an hour on call; the Investigative Committee six times refused to initiate criminal proceedings against law enforcement officers.

Source: Committee for the Prevention of Torture .