The Investigative Committee has refused to open a case on threats received by a lawyer due to a video recording of torture in a Yaroslavl colony

Investigator Gennady Bobrov of the Investigative Committee for the Yaroslavl Region refused to open a criminal case on death threats against lawyer Irina Biryukova of the Public Verdict Foundation, who gave Novaya Gazeta video recordings of torture in local penal colony No. 1 .

The order is dated February 27, but Biryukova told Meduza that she received it only on September 10. The document states that the investigator ordered an examination of two categories of threats received by the lawyer. The first are remarks by FSIN employees, which were relayed to her by unnamed sources. The threats were addressed both to the convicts and to Biryukova. The experts were unable to determine whether there was aggression in these words, since the remarks were transmitted “indirectly by third parties.”

The second category is threats in personal messages on Facebook that Biryukova received shortly after the publication of the torture videos in July 2018. Experts from the forensic center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Yaroslavl Region, having studied these phrases, decided that “there are no signs of verbal aggression in the form of a threat.”

Investigator Bobrov also noted that the five FSIN officers he interviewed "gave identical explanations to each other," which showed that they had not made any threats. Bobrov believed that after the video was published, the case had gained wide resonance. "In such circumstances, making any threats against the convicts would have been simply illogical," he added in the ruling.