The Sun
VLADIMIR Putin’s hellish “torture dungeons” are allegedly giving trapped detainees electric shocks and iron pipe beatings in occupied Crimea, say horrific reports.
Terrified victims’ penises are even being clamped to cruelly force them into submission, add human rights campaigners.
Revelations of their vile torture comes as a defiant Britain warned Putin that he will not stop our ships from sailing past Crimea again, after Russian boats failed to make a Royal Navy destroyer change course.
The Crimea peninsula was illegally annexed from Ukraine by Russia in February-March 2014.
Human rights monitors have recorded more than two hundred cases of inhuman treatment of people, a quarter of which are torture cases, says the Unian Information Society.
Crimea-born Ibrahimjon Mirpochchaev – who managed to flee to safety – told reporters that he was captured during an FSB raid in his house.
Ibrahimjon was tied to a chair, his legs and hands tied up with scotch tape, before being brutally beaten, says Unian.
FSB operatives allegedly put a bag on his head and strangled him, demanding that he confess to extremism.
“They took off my jeans and underwear, put me on the floor, tied my hands around my feet.
“They stuck something into me from behind and connected something, stuffed a rag into my mouth.
“They turned on some kind of machine and I was hit with electricity, I felt like I was burning inside,” he said.
We can only guess how many people have already suffered from Russian torture in Crimea,” says Unian.
There is no access to Crimea for any human rights watchdogs, as Russia has blocked their entry.
Open Democracy also reports on those forced to confess to trumped-up crimes under torture.
One victim, Evgeny Panov, recalled: “During the torture they put a clamp on my penis and then screwed it until I went numb.”
His captors then allegedly beat and shocked him: “They attached some electrodes to my right knee, left leg and hip with tape, and turned the electricity on.
“I lost consciousness several times.”
Panov added: “They beat my head with an iron pipe, my back, my kidneys, my arms, my legs, they stretched my handcuffs till my hands went numb.
“They hung me up by my handcuffs: they bent my legs at the knees, brought the handcuffs to my front just beneath my knees and then put an iron bar under my knees.
“Then two men picked this bar and me up from either side, causing me incredible pain.”
Since Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, the Crimean Tatars – who almost unanimously opposed and resisted the Russian takeover – have been targeted for repressions, explains Radio Free Europe.
It reported in 2020 that hundreds of children of Crimean Tatars are being held by Russia.
Crimean Tatar activist Mumine Saliyeva, whose husband, Seiran Saliyev, was arrested, spoke about the extreme punishment being dealt on a daily basis there.
She described how one person who dared to protest was later found mutilated: “We saw people disappear without a trace.
“They load people up in police vans and cart them off to Russian prisons.
“In Crimea, they are specifically arresting the most noble, courageous, and morally strong men.
“The children caught up in this story are the most vulnerable and defenceless creatures.
“Some of the children are disabled; some have serious illnesses.”
Torture is being used by Russia’s secret service, the FSB, to extract ‘confessions’ with ‘trials’ based solely on anonymous ‘witnesses’, warns the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Labelling Crimea as an occupied territory in a new report, it slams grave abuses carried out “in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, Ukraine”.
Russia has refused the OHCHR’s request to conduct a mission in person to Crimea and monitor firsthand the treatment dealt out to detainees.
Instead, the organisation has interviewed victims of alleged human rights violations in Crimea via remote montoring.
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