The Angarsk City Court of the Irkutsk Region extended the term of Andrei Vereshchak, the head of correctional colony No. 15, where there was a riot of prisoners in 2020, to ten years in a strict regime colony. This was reported by the press service of the regional department of the Investigative Committee.
The jailer was found guilty in cases of abuse of office (part 1 of article 286 of the Criminal Code) and taking a large bribe (part 5 of article 290 of the Criminal Code). He was also fined three million rubles, stripped of his rank of colonel, and banned from working in the public service for six years.
According to investigators, Vereshchak received a million rubles from a subordinate, promising not to fire him for violating labor discipline. In addition, he used the labor of prisoners in his own interests.
At the end of March, the jailer was sentenced to four years in prison in the forest fraud case. According to investigators, in January 2017 he spent 700 thousand rubles to check the sanitary condition of a forest plot that did not belong to the colony.
Vereshchak was detained in February 2021. At first he was under house arrest, later he was transferred to a pre-trial detention center. In April 2020, there was a riot in the Angarsk IK-15, which was led by a colonel. Human rights activists said that the reason was the beating of one of the prisoners.
«They tortured me with a boiler, turned it on in the rectum.» Because of what, employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service were detained in the Irkutsk region
After the riot was suppressed, some of the prisoners were transferred to SIZO-1 of Irkutsk and SIZO-6 of Angarsk, where the sons of Vereshchak worked, as well as to correctional colony No. 6. There, the convicts were tortured and demanded to confess their involvement in the riot. Gulagu.net reported that cellmates in SIZO-1 put a boiler in the anus of prisoner Ondar Kezhik. Another participant in the riot, Maxim Galyaev, said that cellmates in SIZO-1, collaborating with the administration, beat him and raped him with shaving foam.
In the winter of 2021, the Central Office of the Federal Penitentiary Service sent a commission to the Irkutsk Region, after which several criminal cases were opened . Human rights activists representing the victims said that they were deprived of the opportunity to participate in the proceedings, recognizing them as witnesses.