Former police officer Vladimir Vorontsov, the creator of the “Police Ombudsman” public page about violations of the labor rights of security forces, was released from colony No. 5 in Kirovo-Chepetsk, Kirov region. The telegram channel “Former Opera” was the first to report this; the administrator of the “Police Ombudsman” Semyon Fishchuk confirmed Vorontsov’s release in the comments.
Vladimir Vorontsov is already at home, lawyer Fyodor Aksenenko told Mediazona. He was released due to the end of his term.
38-year-old Vladimir Vorontsov has been in jail since May 2020. He was detained after special forces broke into Vorontsov's apartment through the windows, climbing down ropes from the roof, while other officers sawed open his door.
In August 2022, Vladimir Vorontsov was sentenced to five years in a general regime colony. The verdict came into force only in June 2023, when the decision was declared legal on appeal. Then he was transferred from the pre-trial detention center to the colony. According to the “one and a half day” rule that appeared in 2018, a day in a pre-trial detention center during an investigation is counted as one and a half days in a general regime colony.
In August 2023, Vorontsov asked to replace the unserved part of the sentence with a more lenient punishment, but the court in Kirovo-Chepetsk rejected him.
Purge from Vorontsov. In Moscow, police officers are fired on suspicion of supporting the Police Ombudsman project
Former Center E operative Vladimir Vorontsov retired from the police in 2017, after 13 years of service, shortly after launching the Police Ombudsman community on VKontakte. There they posted police requests for help and stories about incidents on duty.
The court found Vorontsov guilty of distributing pornography (points “a”, “b” of part 3 of Article 242 of the Criminal Code), insulting a government official (Article 319 of the Criminal Code ) and extortion (Article 163 of the Criminal Code). Before the verdict, the prosecutor's office dropped 9 of the 14 charges. According to like-minded people, Vorontsov was persecuted for protecting ordinary police officers.
According to investigators, Vorontsov extorted 300 thousand rubles from a Moscow police officer “for not distributing intimate photographs of him.” According to the Investigative Committee, he also blackmailed a person with similar photographs in 2018 and a police officer in 2020.
In addition, the investigation believes that Vorontsov published in his group “insults against current employees of internal affairs bodies and materials of deliberately false information discrediting the honor and dignity of one of the lawyers of the Moscow region.»
The defendant in the case of distributing pornography was another administrator of the Police Ombudsman public page, Igor Khudyakov, a former employee of the Federal Penitentiary Service. After a month in pre-trial detention, he was released from custody, Khudyakov admitted guilt, and the case against him was dropped.
In October 2023, three of Vorontsov’s associates were sentenced to real terms, from 3 to 4 years, in the case of false denunciation. The former police officers tried to prove that there were groundless accusations in the case against the founder of the public, inventing another episode of extortion, and filmed a video for YouTube about their communication with employees of the Moscow police internal security department.
< span class="mz-publish-context-cite__text">Crivolingus is under control at the Bell. How supporters of the “police ombudsman” deceived the investigation to prove falsifications in his case
Updated at 18:46. Added lawyer's comment.