Jailed Russian activist ‘beaten, threatened’

Moscow / AFP

A Russian activist jailed for staging solo anti-government protests claimed in a letter published on Tuesday that he was beaten and threatened with rape and murder in prison.
Ildar Dadin, a 34-year-old activist serving a two-and-a-half year sentence at a prison in Russia’s northwestern region of Karelia, was the first person to be imprisoned under a new law that punishes repeated participation in unsanctioned rallies with jail time.
In a letter to his wife published Tuesday on Meduza, an independent Russian news portal based in Latvia, Dadin said that on the second day of his detention in September, the prison governor and three other employees came to his cell and began beating him.
“They beat me four times that day, 10 to 12 people at a time, they were kicking me,” Dadin said in the letter, transcribed by his lawyer Alexei Liptser on Monday. “After the third beating, they put my head in the toilet bowl right in the isolation cell.”
Dadin also said that prison workers had hung him by his handcuffs for half an hour and pulled his underwear down, threatening him with rape if he refused to stop a hunger strike he had begun after being deprived of basic necessities such as soap and toilet paper.
Dadin added that he was not the only detainee being mistreated and that he had been threated with death if he complained.
“Constant beatings, bullying, humiliation, insults, intolerable detention conditions—this also happens to the other inmates,” Dadin wrote. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday that President Vladimir Putin would be informed of the allegations.
The regional branch of Russia’s investigative committee said it would probe Dadin’s claims, Russian news agencies reported. In his letter, Dadin also called on the Committee Against Torture to ensure his safety as well as that of other inmates.