Rights defenders make film about torture of four Anapa residents

The film "Extreme South", the presentation of which is scheduled for March 2, tells about the fate of four residents of Anapa, who were tortured and became figurants of a criminal case on robbery. For the fourth year, they are under house arrest, whereas there is not a single suspect in the torture case, the Committee against Torture (CaT) has informed.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that Artyom Ponomarchuk, Aram Arustamyan, and Karen and Erik Engoyan, who were detained in Anapa in December 2015, confessed to a robbery. For the period of the investigation, they are under house arrest. Relatives of the young men said that they had confessed to a crime that they had not committed under cruel torture, while investigators had twice refused to initiate a case against law enforcers. The criminal case against them was initiated only in November 2017, only after young men's relatives, together with the CaT's staff, complained at a personal meeting with a deputy head of the Investigating Committee of the Russian Federation (ICRF) about the local investigators' red tape.

The film "Extreme South", made by Evgeny Chilikov and Alexei Novikov, employees of the CaT, tells the story of the above four young men, Sergey Romanov, the head of the CaT's Krasnodar branch, told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Mr Romanov has explained that in the film, Artyom Ponomarchuk, Aram Arustamyan, and Karen and Erik Engoyan talk about what happened to them during and after the detention, while the CaT's employees give the accompanying comments.

The film tells the story of how the lives of several families had changed. According to Sergey Romanov, the torture that the guys had to endure left a painful mark on their relatives too.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on March 1, 2019 at 01:32 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.