The exposure of the tortured men was a warning from Russia to the public

The four men accused of carrying out the deadliest terrorist attack in decades in Russia appeared before a Moscow court on Sunday evening blindfolded and beaten.

One came in with his partially severed ear covered.

Another was in an orange wheelchair, his left eye bulging, his hospital gown open and a catheter in his lap.

Many people around the world, including Russians, already knew what had happened to them.

Since Saturday, videos of the men have been widely circulated on social media. be tortured during interrogations, in what analysts called apparent retaliation for the concert hall attack they are accused of carrying out on Friday, which killed at least 139 people and injured 180 others.

One of the most disturbing videos showed an accused, identified as Saidakrami M. Rajabalizoda, with a part of his ear cut off and stuffed into his mouth.

A photograph circulating on the Internet showed a battery connected to the genitals of another, Shamsidin Fariduni, while he was detained.

It was not immediately clear how the videos began to circulate, but their diffusion occurred remotely nationalist and pro-war channels From Telegram considered close to the Russian security services.

Although the bloodiest footage was not broadcast on state television, the brutal treatment meted out to the defendants was clear.

And the decision of the Russian authorities to show it so publicly in court, as they had almost never done before, was intended to be a sign of revenge and warning potential terrorists, analysts say.

In Russia’s recent history, torture videos have not been broadcast on state television, Olga Sadovskaya said Committee against torturea Russian human rights organization.

“There were two intentions” in circulating the videos, Sadovskaya said.

“First, show people who might be planning another terrorist attack what could happen to them, and second, show society there is revenge for all that people suffered in this terrorist attack.”

She and other analysts said the flagrant display of tortured people demonstrates something else: how far Russian society has extended it was militarized and has tolerated violence since the start of the war in Ukraine.

“This is a sign of how far we have come in accepting new methods of warfare,” said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services.

Tolerance

International surveys have shown that societies tolerate violence against people they perceive as the worst criminals, including terrorists, serial killers and perpetrators of violent crimes against children.

However, Sadovskaya said that the videos broadcast on television represent a new low for the Russian state.

“This shows that the state and the authorities demonstrate that violence is acceptable, that they normalize the torture of a particular subject,” he said.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskovhe declined to comment on the torture allegations during a briefing with reporters on Monday.

But the former president Dmitry Medvedev, who currently serves as Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, said:

“Kudos to those who caught them.”

“Should we kill them? We should. And we will,” she wrote on Telegram on Monday.

“But it’s more important to kill everyone involved“in the attack.

“Everyone: those who paid, those who showed solidarity, those who helped”.

Ivan Pavlov, a lawyer who defended difficult national security cases before he was forced to flee Russia, said torture has long been used in terrorism and murder cases, mostly in hidden locations.”

Once news of torture spreads in prisons, he said, “others know that if you are accused of terrorism, the special forces will torture you.

“So it works as prevention.”

Sunday’s court hearings were unusual because the torture was so blatantly displayed, Pavlov said.

“They used to hide it from the general public, but now they don’t because the general public is prepared for violence,” he said.

“Because of the war it is no longer something extremely unpleasant for the general public.”

Russia is no longer part of the European Convention on Human Rightsbut the Russian Constitution prohibits torture.

It is also part of the United Nations Convention against Torture.

Because torture is a crime both under international law and in many countries, defense lawyers would normally seek to have any testimony obtained under torture dismissed because it is shamefully unreliablesaid Scott Roehm, director of global policy and advocacy for the Center for Victims of Torture, a Minnesota-based organization that works around the world.

The black-and-white legal conclusion that torture is a crime, a fundamental aspect of international human rights law, has been challenged in the United States since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Roehm noted.

Then the military commissions that dealt with the cases in question Guantanamo Bay They had to take into account that some evidence was contaminated by torture.

“Torturers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the various consequences of their actions,” Roehm said, especially after an attack like the one in Moscow.

“I think the mentality of a torturer is often a mixture of a good degree of vindictiveness and a completely mistaken and ignorant belief that someone can be forced to ‘confess’ under torture, and that the confession can be used to convict them.”

Background

Extremist trials in Russia are generally closed, as are most Sunday hearings, so it is impossible to know the extent to which defense lawyers have objected to the practice.

Most Russian judges would probably ignore it anyway, Pavlov said, because they know in advance what is expected of them in terms of sentencing the accused.

Indeed, the judge in the case of Muhammadsobir Z. Fayzov, 19 years old, who at times seemed barely consciousalmost completely ignored the fact that the defendant was in a wheelchair with an open hospital gown and a plastic container containing urine from his catheter in his lap.

The only time the judge acknowledged this was when he ordered the two doctors accompanying Fayzov to be removed from the courtroom with the rest of the audience at the end of the hearing, according to the report by Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet.

The flagrant display of suspects being mistreated on Sunday was particularly egregious, Pavlov noted.

“These are sad circumstances, of course,” he said, “but they made the process a circus”.

Soldatov, the security services expert, said the torture and the official response to it were a signal to the military that horrific violence was now underway. acceptable and encouraged.

By releasing the torture videos, he said, the authorities are “sending this message of intimidation to everyone who is not on the side of the Kremlin, and sending a very encouraging message to the military and security services that are on the same page.” . .

Ruslan Shaveddinov, activist and investigative journalist affiliated with Anti-corruption fund From Alexei NavalnyThe opposition figure who died in a Russian prison last month called on Russians to condemn both the terrorists and the torture inflicted on them.

“It’s important to say: Torture is not normal,” he tweeted on Sunday.

“Torture as a phenomenon should not exist. The police and the State torture a terrorist today, see the approval of this method and tomorrow they will torture an activist, a journalist or any other person. “They don’t know any other way.”

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