A Russian court ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to pay compensation in the amount of 3.8 million rubles ( 40,600 dollars) to the family of a man who committed suicide after being tortured in police custody almost seven years ago, the human rights organization "Traumpunkt" reported today, quoted by Reuters and BTA.
The highly publicized case made headline news when a court in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan found five former local police officers guilty of torturing remand Ilnaz Pirkin in an attempt to extract a confession about a series of robberies.
Pirkin killed himself in October 2017, shortly after being released from police custody in Nizhnekamsk, a city of 250,000 about 1,000 km east of Moscow. At that time, the man was 22 years old.
Several police officers, including the head of the local anti-corruption unit, were convicted in 2020 of mistreating the man and received lengthy prison terms, although some had their sentences reduced last year.
The court in Nizhnekamsk today ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to pay 3 million rubles ($32,000) in moral damages to Pirkin's parents and 800,000 rubles ($8,600) to his sister. Human rights activists described this compensation as a record high for a case of police arbitrariness in Russia.
Russian lawyer and head of the human rights organization "Team Against Torture", Sergey Babinets, said the amount was "quite significant". for Russian courts, which typically award 150,000 rubles ($1,600) in compensation to the families of torture victims.
Babinets' NGO has documented 3,591 cases of human rights violations in Russia since its inception in 2000 and has assisted in 167 convictions in cases of torture by state officials.
Investigators opened cases in only 45 percent of the torture cases identified by the organization, Babinets said.
"We hope that the increase in compensation will not remain an isolated case, but will become a systematic change that will protect the rights of citizens who have become the object of a crime by public officials," added the lawyer, quoted by Reuters .
In a video recorded by Pirkin before he took his own life and published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Svoboda, he says the police took him into the woods and beat him, then put a closed gas mask on him on the head, due to which he began to suffocate.
"Of course I signed all the confessions and indicated that they were voluntary," Pirkin says, adding, "I hope my actions and this video will influence the police in the future.