The departments of the Investigative Committee and the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Saratov region began checks after reports of policemen beating a teenager near Saratov. This is reported by the press service of the regional IC and the local publication «Vzglyad-Info».
The day before, on May 16, Saratov human rights activist Boris Ushakov published on his YouTube channel an appeal from the mother of the beaten teenager, Olga Paratova. According to the woman, on May 12, her 14-year-old son Andrey was driving from the village of Stepnoye to the village of Sovetskoye, 50 kilometers from Saratov. While waiting for the bus, the young man decided to work out on the horizontal bars near the bus stop. He was cheered on by an unknown man, who then donned a hood and ran away. Probably, the security forces were following him.
When a teenager got off the bus in Sovetsky, he was attacked by police officers, hit him with the back door of the car, knocked him to the ground and handcuffed him. At the police station, Andrei, according to his mother, was punched in the face, beaten in the stomach and kidneys. The security forces kept the young man in handcuffs for an hour and a half, trying to get him to confess to drug trafficking.
The teenager kept saying that he was 14 years old and he came to visit his grandmother. Not finding anything forbidden on him, the police released Andrei, asking him to tell at home that he had fallen while getting off the bus. Later, the young man reported the beating of his mother. On the same day, the fact of beatings was documented in the district hospital.
According to Paratova, she wrote a statement to the police, but the head of the local criminal investigation department, Aidar Kinzhigaliev, and the head of the district commission for minors, Natalya Yezhova, suggested that she «negotiate peacefully.»
“We were forced to retract the statement and write that our son just fell. I was afraid that they might create problems for us, and perhaps they would plant drugs, ”said Paratova.
The regional department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that they were carrying out «a set of measures aimed at establishing all the circumstances of the incident.» A similar wording is contained in the UK release.