Anti-war activist dies in Russian prison ‘after being tortured with stun gun’

Anatoly Berezikov, 40, died the day before he was due to be released from prison

An anti-war activist has died in a Russian prison after being tortured with a stun gun, a human rights group has said.

Rostov police have insisted that Anatoly Berezikov, 40, died by suicide following his arrest on suspicion of treason for putting up posters that called for the Russian army to leave Ukraine.

However, First Department, the human rights NGO he worked for, said Berezikov died on Wednesday, the day before he was due to be released, after being taken to a forest and wounded with the weapon.

Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer for the group, said that the alleged treatment of the activist, a supporter of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, fitted a wider pattern.

He said torture had been normalised and that people accused of treason are taken to a basement or a forest and given electric shocks, “often to the genitals”, and, in some cases, subjected to a mock execution.

“The lucky ones are just beaten,” he added.

Berezikov’s lawyer in Rostov said his client had injuries from a stun gun on his body the day before he died.

Since launching its war on Ukraine in February last year, the Kremlin has clamped down on dissent.

It has banned opposition, locked up thousands of protesters and encouraged a Soviet-style system of police informers in neighbourhoods across Russia.

OVD-Info, a Russian NGO that monitors the police, said that in the next week alone 41 “political criminal cases” are due to be heard in Russian courts.

Alexandra Baeva, a lawyer based in Moscow, told The Telegraph that although deaths in police custody have become relatively common in Russia, Berezikov’s death was unusual.

“This is the first death of a political activist in police custody,” she said. “Berezikov complained about torture to his lawyer and the day before he was due to be released, he died.”

Ms Baeva said it has become standard practice in Russia for police officers to record a suicide if a prisoner dies during a torture session.

“Prisoners die from a lack of assistance, a lack of medicine. They can also die from torture. Police officers are practically never investigated,” she said.

In April, human rights activists reported that the mother of a 28-year-old man who had died in a prison in Perm, central Russia, had been told that she would have to wait until 2027 for his death to be investigated.

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