As reported by Associated Press, prominent Russian human rights activists accused the prison system Tuesday of using hardened criminals to torture other inmates with the aim of extracting confessions.

Lev Ponomaryov said his organization, For Human Rights, has received many letters from prisoners reporting abuse.

“There exist about a dozens of these concentration camps, and I’m not exaggerating here, in which groups of the toughest criminals, people who are serving time for pedophilia, for rape and other crimes, get official permission to torture, to rape and sometimes even to kill whomever they are told,” Ponomaryov said at a news conference.

The prison service, which oversees 887,000 inmates in nearly 800 prisons around the country, denied the allegations of abuse.

The same day, President Dmitry Medvedev appointed a new director of the Federal Prison Service, former police lieutenant Alexander Reimer. Human rights activists said they were eager to meet with him to discuss problems in the prison system.

A special disciplinary department within the prison service is responsible for some of the gravest abuses, Ponomaryov said. But, Ponomaryov acknowledged the difficulty of investigating allegations of abuse, saying that is in part because of a shortage of funding.

Prison Spokesman Yevgeny Saurin said the accusations were untrue, noting the case of an inmate from Chechnya who was the subject of reports alleging abuse.

“We have videos of the inmate showing that, as we suspected, the condemned hit his own arms and head against the wall. So all of these accusations that our critics make need to be proven,” he said.

The government filed charges against the journalist who reported the alleged abuses. The journalist, Yelena Maglevannaya, 27, wrote for Svobodnoye Slovo, a newspaper in the southern city of Volgograd. She traveled to Finland for a conference in May and did not return, seeking political asylum.


Source: Agencies