The Angarsk City Court convicted Andrey Vereshchak, ex-head of IK-15, guilty of accepting a large bribe (part 5 of article 290 of the Criminal Code) and abuse of authority (part 1 of article 286 of the Criminal Code). According to Taiga, he was sentenced to 10 years in a strict regime colony and a fine of 3 million rubles.
“The investigation and the court established that the head of PKU IK-15 received funds in the amount of 1 million rubles from a subordinate employee. The bribe was intended for committing inaction in favor of the bribe giver – in the failure to take measures to dismiss the latter for a gross violation of labor discipline. In addition, the person involved in the case <…> without proper registration of the fact of involvement in labor involved convicts serving sentences in an institution, ”the message of the RF Investigative Committee for the Irkutsk Region says.
In March 2023, Vereshchak was sentenced to 4 years in a penal colony for arranging payments for the survey of a forest plot that did not belong to the colony, using funds allocated to the institution from the federal budget. The damage exceeded 700 thousand rubles.
Vereshchak headed the Angarsk IK-15 until December 2020, his place was taken by the ex-head of the Irkutsk SIZO-6 Arslan Mazhidov.
In January last year, the Investigative Committee opened 17 criminal cases on the facts of torture and sexual abuse, which were subjected to prisoners of SIZO-1 in Irkutsk. A stream of complaints about torture and rape in Irkutsk colonies and pre-trial detention centers began to come after the “riot” in the Angarsk IK-15 in the spring of 2020. Then, about a hundred prisoners were taken from IK-15 to Irkutsk SIZO-1 and Angarsk SIZO-6, where some of them were brutally tortured and raped, demanding to take the blame for organizing the "rebellion" or to give other testimony necessary to the security forces.
In total, about 30 people were recognized as victims in the joint case of torture in the pre-trial detention center and colonies of the Irkutsk region. Human rights activists insisted that in fact there were many more victims, and many employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service who were involved in bullying were never punished and still work in the prison system.
This is the first ever criminal case on mass torture of a sexualized nature in the institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service, and it has not yet reached the court. Human rights activists said that during the investigation, many victims became frightened and began to withdraw their words, as they were pressured.
On December 8, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the rank of Major General to Leonid Sagalakov, under whose leadership the “torture conveyor” began operating in full force in the region.