Lawyers treat verdict to Dagestani law enforcers for kidnapping and torture as lenient

The court handed down an overly lenient sentence to five law enforcers convicted of kidnapping and torturing a woman from Dagestan; and the lengthy investigation into the case is related to the systemic problems in the law enforcement system, lawyers have pointed out.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the Supreme Court (SC) of Dagestan upheld the sentence of Rasul Saduev, the head of the Khasavyurt criminal investigation division, and three policemen (Rashid Abdurashidov, Mugazhir Alibudlatov and Shamil Gaziev); the SC has also replaced the conditional imprisonment of Gimbat Lakhiyalov, the deputy head of the criminal investigation department of the Dagestani Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA), for the real term in colony.

The verdicts were excessively lenient due to the fact that the defendants were policemen, said Alexei Golenko, a lawyer at the Moscow Bar Association. According to his story, the victims' rights have not been fully restored.

He has explained the lengthy trial by deliberately protracting the process, calling it a systemic problem in Russia.

"This crime is punishable by 3 to 10 years of freedom deprivation. However, the court imposed a punishment that only slightly exceeded the minimum threshold ... Given the fact that policemen had tortured the woman with particular sadism, used electric shocks and beatings, threatened rape and murder, and fired blank shots in the back of her head – of course, it's difficult to call the sentence harsh," said a source from the human rights organization "Team Against Torture" (TaT)*.

"Indeed, the sentence is excessively lenient. For example, Artyom Komardin, reading poetry at the Mayakovsky monument in Moscow, was sentenced to seven years in colony," said Vladimir Vasilenko, a lawyer, who collaborates with a Moscow human rights organization.

Although the punishment is excessively lenient, cases of torture used by policemen themselves are an extremely rare occurrence in the Russian law enforcement system, the lawyer has noted.

*The "Team against Torture" (TaT, formerly the "Committee against Torture" – CaT) was created by the lawyers who had earlier worked for the CaT, which was included into the register of the NCOs performing the functions of foreign agents.