A court in Russia’s Yaroslavl has handed jail terms to three Russian prison guards for torturing Vazha Bochorishvili, a prison inmate who died a month after the beating, the Public Verdict human rights organisation reports.
The court sentenced the employees of the Yaroslavl prison Sergey Gusarin and Vyacheslav Shashkin to three years in prison. Another prison guard Sergey Kuzmin was sentenced to 3.5 years behind bars. All three have been found guilty of abuse of authority with the use of violence, weapons or special means. The prison guards “pled guilty and expressed remorse for the crime”, Public Verdict notes.
Photo: Vazha Bochorishvili during the beating by prison guards. Screenshot
In February 2021, Novaya Gazeta and Public Verdict published video footage shot in 2016 and 2017 on the body cam of one of the guards. One of the videos shows the beating of Vazha Bochorishvili.
The inmate was beaten for several hours for refusing to undergo a body search in the presence of a woman. Public Verdict reports that Gusarin and Shashkin held the man by his legs while Kuzmin was beating him with a police baton. After that, the man, who suffered from several chronic illnesses, was sent to solitary confinement. He had a haemorrhage there and died a month later.
In March 2022, the Russian Investigative Committee opened a criminal case on “provision of services that do not meet safety requirements and that inadvertently caused grievous bodily harm or death”.
