Jailed whisleblowers cry for help
A former prosecutor and a policeman who reported about police manipulations fear for their lives in a Komi prison.
“Without your help we might soon end our days in this prison”, Grigori Chekalin writes in a letter distributed through his lawyer. Both he and the policeman Mikhail Yevseyev were arrested after they reported about police falsifications in the Komi Republic.
The letter from Chechalin is available on the website of newspaper Krasnaya Znamya.
Both Chekalin and Yevseyev worked on the case of the 2005 arson in a shopping mall in Ukhta, Komi Republic. Two young local men in 2009 got 20 years sentences for their alleged crime. However, Chekalin and Yevseyev are confident that the men are innocent and that the charges against them are based on false evidence. They subsequently addressed President Dmitri Medvedev and called for his intervention in the case.
After that, they were both soon arrested. According to the Moscow Times, Chekalin is now serving a 18-month sentence on charges of false testimony in the shopping mall case, while Yevseyev got 15 months for leaking classified materials related to the investigation.
As reported by BarentsObserver, 25 people died in the fire in the “Passage” shopping mall.
Read also: Shopping centre disaster brought to court
The two arrested men now fear for their lives. Chekalin in his letter openly indicates that the prison employees, with the consent of regional prosecutors, might be planning his murder.
“They will close their eyes for all violations, and what’s even more terrible – they will, with instructions from the Komi prosecutors, create unbearable prison conditions. I do not exclude that they will find drugs in my pockets and guns among my belongings, and this is not even the worst variant …”, the letter reads.
According to Chekalin, he was recently given seven days in solitary confinement because he was using a 1 USD bill as bookmark. Foreign currency is illegal in Russian jails, the prison officials argued.
Read also: Honest cop detained
The case against Chekalin and Yevseyev are not unique in today’s Russia. When speaking out about “endemic” corruption in the Russian police force in 2006, the police officer Aleksei Dymovski from Novorossiisk faced tremendous pressure from the system. He was dismissed from his job and later charged on allegations of fraud.
You can follow the Chekalin case on the website http://dymovskiy.name/blog/chekalin
