In Abkhazia, five members of the local police were charged in a case of torturing a tourist from Russia. According to Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora human rights association, the case has been sent to the Gagra District Court.
According to the human rights activist, two years ago a resident of St. Petersburg approached him and said that she had been bullied at the police station in Gagra together with her husband and girlfriend. Tourists were detained at an observation deck in the mountains and accused of selling drugs. They were kept at the police station for 16 hours, the room where they lived was searched, their phones were taken away and all documents were photographed.
“With the help of torture and threats, they tried to force him to confess to selling drugs. My husband Artem suffered the most. He was kept in a cage for many hours, beaten, hanged, drowned and threatened with a gun. My girlfriend was interrogated, frightened with rape. They only frightened me and interrogated me for many hours, offered to hand over my friends, because supposedly they would be imprisoned anyway, ”the woman said. In the end, the tourists were taken to the border with Russia and ordered never to return to Abkhazia.
According to Chikov, the human rights activists did not count on success, but in the end they managed to open a case. The following police officers of the Gagra district were charged with abuse of power with the use of violence: Bagatelia Kh.V., Dzhalagoniya D.Yu., Chitanava A.L., Misheliya I.R. and Anshba T.R.
In September 2021, the press service of the Prosecutor General's Office of Abkhazia announced that a case had been opened on the torture of Artem Russkikh, a tourist from St. Petersburg. The defendants in the case were the head of the department for combating property crimes of the criminal investigation department Khajarat Bagatelia, detective Timur Anshba, district police officer Dmitry Dzhalagonia. It was noted that other security officials, whose identities have not been established, also took part in the bullying.