BBC publishes stories of torture victims at Rostov prison hospital

Former patients of the prison hospital located in Rostov-on-Don told that they were starved, tied to beds and injected with potent drugs. Vazgen Zargaryan, a prisoner, was "treated" there for more than 10 times, and once was tied up for 71 days.

Igor Tkachenko, a former prisoner, spent almost two months with breaks at the psycho-neurological ward of the hospital. According to his story, all this time he was in bed tightly fixed with ropes. Three times a day, he was injected with psychotropic drugs and hardly fed, to the material of the BBC Russian Service assert.

During an inspection conducted in August 2020, human rights defenders found roped people in several hospital wards at once. The number of torture episodes reached 62. It also turned out that one of the prisoners, Roman Mikhailov, died in the prison hospital in the summer of 2020, presumably due to roping.

In the fall of 2021, an investigation began on the prisoner, Vazgen Zargaryan, who had been roped to the bed for 71 days. He had been accused of preparing to participate in a terrorist organization and an illegal armed grouping abroad.

"It's hard to stay in bed all the time. From haloperidol, the whole body is rigidly stretched… You don't understand anything, and it's impossible to fall asleep. You urinate and defecate into your bed; and in order not to do so, they give almost no food to you," said the prisoners who endured the rope-binding.

They can punish you with rope-binding for anything – a quarrel with colony bosses, a monetary debt or complaints about custody conditions. A prisoner was declared schizophrenic or "violent" and taken to the wards.