The head of the Angarsk penal colony-15, where a prisoner riot occurred in 2020, has had his sentence increased to 10 years.

The Angarsk City Court of the Irkutsk Region increased the sentence of Andrei Vereshchak, the head of correctional colony No. 15, where there was a prisoner riot in 2020, to ten years in a maximum security colony. This was reported by the press service of the regional department of the Investigative Committee.

The jailer was found guilty in cases of abuse of power (Part 1 of Article 286 of the Criminal Code) and receiving a large bribe (Part 5 of Article 290 of the Criminal Code). He was also fined three million rubles, stripped of his rank of colonel and banned from working in the public service for six years.

According to investigators, Vereshchak received a million rubles from a subordinate, promising not to fire him for violating labor discipline. In addition, he used the labor of prisoners for his own interests.

At the end of March, the jailer was sentenced to four years in prison for timber fraud. According to investigators, in January 2017 he spent 700 thousand rubles to check the sanitary condition of a forest area that did not belong to the colony.

Vereshchak was detained in February 2021. At first he was under house arrest , later he was transferred to a pre-trial detention center. In April 2020, a riot occurred in Angarsk IK-15, which was led by a colonel. Human rights activists said that the reason was the beating of one of the prisoners.

After the riot was suppressed, some of the prisoners were transferred to SIZO-1 of Irkutsk and SIZO-6 of Angarsk, where Vereshchak’s sons worked, as well as to correctional colony No. 6. There, the convicts were tortured and demanded to confess their involvement in the riot. Gulagu.net reported that fellow inmates in pre-trial detention center No. 1 shoved a boiler into the anus of prisoner Ondar Kezhik. Another participant in the riot, Maxim Galyaev , said that inmates in pre-trial detention center No. 1, collaborating with the administration, beat him and raped him with shaving foam.

In the winter of 2021, the Central Office of the Federal Penitentiary Service sent a commission to the Irkutsk region, after which several criminal cases were opened. Human rights activists representing the victims said that they were deprived of the opportunity to participate in the proceedings, recognizing them as witnesses.