Mother claims that her son was subjected to police violence and was illegally detained during the mass protest on December 1 in Sofia.
„Nikolai was beaten, was not provided with medical care and went alone to ISUL, where they stitched up his head and returned to the protest. When nothing happened, he was illegally arrested together with other people," Desislava Aleksieva, mother of Nikolay Aleksiev, one of the young people detained at the protest on December 1, told journalists on the sidelines of the National Assembly.
The young man was detained for 24 hours there.
„Then, together with Yoan Dzhirol and Bozhidar Bobokov, he was transferred to the pre-trial detention center; they do not know each other. Investigations have been opened against all the detainees on blanket charges, the same for each. They state that because the cases are of heightened public sensitivity, this is an aggravating circumstance. The lawyer I had hired was not allowed to see the detainees for almost two hours," explained the mother, quoted by BTA.
According to her, on December 2, her son gave information to the lawyers that he had been beaten in custody and that police violence had been used against him to make him admit that there were pirates in his cell. According to her, the young man was refused to have his hands swabbed. The mother added that this happened to all the other detainees.
Nikolai was detained while he was in a small shop near the headquarters of “DPS-New Beginning“. The mother continued her story by saying that her son remembered the numbers of the police officers who beat him at the protest. They stopped when a plainclothes police officer told them to stop because there were cameras around them. “We expect the police to request these records“, added Alexieva.
“I was in the Fifth District Department and saw how the police trampled on the rights of all detainees, how girls were tied to the bench and kept like that for a whole day. I am not lying, just like Minister Daniel Mitov is trying“, she said. Alexieva rhetorically asked Minister Mitov if he sleeps at night.