Russia’s Interior Ministry is introduce new measures aimed at tightening police discipline, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said on Wednesday, following a spate of scandals involving custody deaths and other crimes by the police.
Nurgaliyev announced the move following a round table with rights activists and church officials titled Spirituality, Morality, Law. He did not specify what measures would be introduced.
The move comes after the National Investigation Committee said two policemen and their accomplice from the Siberian Kemerovo Region had been charged with beating to death a 25-year-old man in December.
“Policemen were interrogating the man for participation in crimes; they illegally moved him to a private garage. The policemen and their accomplice tortured the detainee to force him to admit his guilt,” the Investigation Committee said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The young man died and in a bid to conceal the crime policemen left his body near a road,” the statement said.
The policemen could get up to ten year behind bars if found guilty of the killing.
In March, Nurgaliyev fired the head of a district police department in the Russian republic of Tatarstan after a detainee died in custody after police allegedly sodomized him with a bottle.
The victim, Kazan resident Sergei Nazarov, 52, died while being treated in hospital for severe colon damage, shortly after his arrest on March 9. Police say Nazarov was detained for disorderly conduct, but his relatives claim the charges against him may be false.
Nazarov managed to tell medical staff at the hospital that he was raped and beaten up by policemen, according to his relatives. Preliminary examinations found his injuries were caused by a blunt object, and “he could not have done it to himself.”
