Released Russian Pilot Yaroshenko Says He Was Brutally Tortured in Liberia Before Extradition to US

The pilot was arrested in Liberia in 2010 based on an allegation that he was planning to smuggle four tonnes of cocaine. Yaroshenko had been sentenced to 20 years in prison, but was exchanged for US citizen Trevor Reed, who, in turn, was serving a sentence in a Russian prison.

Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was imprisoned in the US but was recently exchanged for an American citizen incarcerated in Russia, has revealed the tortures he had to endure during his detention in Liberia. The country's law enforcement detained the pilot on 28 May 2010 on an order from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), but handed him over to the American authorities only two days later.

"I had to sit on a chair without one leg for several days [...] Three agents had been beating my heels, kidneys around the clock. I was tortured, strangled – it was very serious, believe me," Yaroshenko said in an interview to the Russian newspaper Izvestia.

Yaroshenko further said that his detention could hardly be called an "arrest" and looked more like a kidnapping because no official procedures were followed during it. The pilot noted that the US and Liberia hadn't even properly notified the Russian authorities about the arrest of their citizen.

The pilot said that the notification arrived only in June or August and was backdated. To make things worse, the US sent it to a Romanian embassy instead of the Russian one, he added. The Russian pilot currently considers holding the US authorities accountable.

"I would like to continue this case in a legal plane through our courts in order to show the entire world community what the US authorities have done to me", he said.

During his last two years in US prison, Yaroshenko gradually started to lose his Russian language skills. He explained that there were very few Russian-speaking inmates there and after the start of the pandemic the prison blocks were mostly isolated and he ended up in one without Russian-speaking prisoners. The pilot admitted that it's difficult to switch back to Russian, while the newspaper interviewing him noted that he used a lot of "Americanisms" in his Russian speech.

Yaroshenko was exchanged in Turkey for a US citizen, Trevor Reed and returned to Moscow on 27 April. Reed was serving a prison sentence in Russia for assaulting police officers during arrest. The exchange was a result of a lengthy and difficult negotiations process, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

The pilot was sentenced to 20 years in US prison in 2011 on charges of planning to smuggle four tonnes of cocaine. Yaroshenko strongly denied accusations insisting he was not even working in the industry of cargo transportation and mostly was inspecting the technical state of the aircraft.

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