MOSCOW, July 9 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian jihadist convicted of a 2009 train bombing that left 28 dead and scores injured was tortured and killed in jail, his father and a human rights group claimed Tuesday.
Umatgirei Kartoev said his son Tarkhan died on June 29 in a prison outside the Urals city of Yekaterinburg after being “severely beaten and tortured.”
“He was electrocuted or doused with boiling water,” Umatgirei Kartoev told RIA Novosti. “What I need is to punish whoever is guilty of doing it to him.”
Last May, a Russian court sentenced the 40-year-old from the southern Ingushetia province to seven years in jail for his role in the November 2009 Nevsky Express train bombing in the central Tver region.
Tarkhan and nine other people, also from Ingushetia, were convicted of planting makeshift explosives that derailed the last two cars of the train, killing 28 and injuring many more.
The 10 were part of a jihadist group that was part of a broader Islamic insurgency fighting to establish an independent Islamic state in Russia’s predominantly Muslim Northern Caucasus region.
Tarkhan’s father said that a telegram from prison authorities said his son died from cardiac arrest.
A prison official confirmed the cause of death. “There are no traces of violent death on the body,” Yelena Tishchenko of the Sverdlovsk region penitentiary service told RIA Novosti on July 1. “Despite efforts to resuscitate him that lasted 30 minutes, there was no heartbeat.”
However, Umatgirei Kartoev believes that photos taken of his son post-mortem tell a different story. He submitted the pictures to respected human rights group Memorial, and they are accessible on its website.
The pictures show a body that looks like it is covered in burns and contusions. A line of deep stitches runs up from the right ear and across the top of the head, the nose looks like it could have been broken, and the nails have been either removed or badly damaged.
“In my non-professional opinion, this man was tortured, although it is impossible to verify it,” Timur Akiev, head of Memorial’s branch in Ingushetia, told RIA Novosti. He also said the group has sent the pictures to forensic experts and filed a formal request with the Investigative Committee, Russia’s top investigative body.
Investigators in the Sverdlovsk region, where Kartoev served time, said last week that they would open a new probe into his death.
For years, radical Islamists have been active in the Caucasus, attacking police and federal forces almost daily and organizing terrorist attacks that have claimed hundreds of lives.
The situation is further complicated by what human rights groups describe as extrajudicial killings, abductions and torture committed by law enforcement agencies that erode public trust in them and increase latent support for the extremists among the population.
The Islamic insurgency in the Caucasus dates back to the 1994 war between Chechen separatists and Moscow. Ingushetia, an impoverished province the size of Rhode Island, shares close linguistic and cultural ties with Chechnya.
