A Daghestani court has handed two police officers suspended sentences for torturing a detained woman and fabricating drug charges against her. This was already the third verdict in the case, as the republic’s Supreme Court had twice overturned earlier rulings.
The Khasavyurt City Court found officers Shamil Aliev and Ramazan Saypulaev guilty of abuse of office involving violence. Aliev received a suspended sentence of three years and six months, while Saypulaev was given three years suspended. Both were banned from holding positions in law enforcement agencies for three years.
A police operative, Maya Akhmedova, was also convicted alongside them. All three were found guilty of falsifying evidence and each was fined ₽150,000 ($2,000). However, they were released from punishment on those charges because the statute of limitations had expired.
According to the case materials, police officers detained Daghestan resident Yulduz Kurashova in March 2020 on suspicion of drug possession. Kurashova stated that after her detention she was beaten in order to force a confession, extorted for money under threats of being killed, and that drugs had been planted on her. She said she was only released after signing a confession to the offence she was accused of.
Kurashova said that while working in a pharmacy several years earlier, she had sold narcotic medications there. According to her, when she was taken to the police station, officers told her they would claim in the case materials that they had allegedly found Lyrica tablets on her person, although they had not actually been there.
According to Kurashova, she handed ₽450,000 ($6,000) to the officers.
‘I was afraid because I have a small child. They threatened me with my child, saying they would deprive me of my parental rights. I gave them the money so they would leave me alone’, Kurashova said.
A forensic medical examination recorded that Kurashova had suffered a closed head injury, concussion, and multiple bruises.
Although a criminal case was initially opened against Kurashova on charges related to trafficking potent narcotic substances, it was later dropped due to lack of evidence of a crime. Investigators subsequently concluded that part of the criminal case materials had indeed been fabricated.
Even after criminal proceedings were opened against the officers, Kurashova continued to receive threats from them. In May 2022, she was placed under state protection after evidence was presented in court showing that the accused officers had attempted to contact her. According to the case materials, they then made threats directly during a court hearing.
Magomed Alamov, a lawyer with the North Caucasus branch of the Committee Against Torture, said this was the third time the organisation’s torture victims had been granted state protection, and the first case in which defendant law enforcement officers openly threatened a victim in court. According to him, one of the defendants told Kurashova during a hearing: ‘You’re finished’.
At the end of 2022, the former police officers were first found guilty and sentenced to real prison terms. However, the Supreme Court of Daghestan overturned that verdict and ordered a retrial. After the second verdict, the court again sent the case back for reconsideration. During the repeated proceedings, the victim’s lawyers and human rights defenders repeatedly complained that the case was being deliberately delayed.
Cases involving torture and fabricated criminal prosecutions in the North Caucasus regularly become the subject of investigations by human rights organisations and appeals to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Despite periodic criminal prosecutions of law enforcement officers, real prison sentences in such cases remain rare.
Elizaveta Chukharova
In recent years, several high-profile cases involving police violence have been heard in Daghestan. Victims in different cases have reported beatings, electric shocks, strangulation and threats during interrogations. Some of these cases were closed without convictions, while others remained under investigation for years.
Following the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities adopted a series of laws restricting the activities of independent human rights organisations and making public reporting on abuses by security forces more difficult. Despite this, reports of torture and ill-treatment continue to emerge from republics across the North Caucasus, including Daghestan.
