YEKATERINBURG, November 21 (RIA Novosti) – An employee of a Russian drug rehab center run by an opposition politician was convicted Thursday of detaining patients against their will.
Igor Shabalin was given two years and four months in prison for unlawful imprisonment, but released from the courtroom because of the time he had spent in pretrial detention.
Shabalin was accused of locking up and handcuffing nine female patients of Yevgeny Roizman’s City Without Drugs foundation in the city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals.
Both the prosecution and the defense said they would appeal the sentence.
The sentencing coincided with the detention of another City Without Drugs employee, former weightlifter Sergei Kolesnichenko, who was held following a complaint filed by two former patients of the rehab center this spring.
Kolesnichenko, a former patient, has worked at City Without Drugs since 2005.
“It looks like one hostage was swapped for another. They [the police] have waited for more than six months [after receiving the complaint] and now they suddenly try to arrest him and do what they had already done to Igor [Shabalin],” Roizman said, commenting on the sentencing and the detention.
City Without Drugs is known for its hardline approach to patients, who are often admitted to rehab without their written consent – usually at relatives’ request – and subjected to harsh methods to wean them off their addictions.
The foundation denies accusations of deprivation of freedom, saying patients, even if admitted without their consent, are free to leave after submitting a written statement.
A foundation employee was convicted on similar charges in 2010, but given a suspended sentence on appeal.
Roizman, an ex-lawmaker with a criminal record from Soviet times, enjoys a vigilante’s reputation over his relentless campaign against drug dealers.
His popularity was reflected in his win over the pro-Kremlin candidate in September mayoral elections in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-biggest city.
Roizman, 51, is affiliated with tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, who runs the moderately oppositional party Civic Platform and who claimed to have come under pressure from the Kremlin for backing Roizman.
Russia has 8.5 million drug users, mainly due to an inflow of opiates from Afghanistan, according to a government report released in September.
