Confessions made under torture are not necessarily true, say Amnesty International and Dignity.
An army of press people was ready when four men, who are suspected of being behind the terrorist attack in Moscow, were taken into court for questioning on Sunday evening.
As the cameras flashed, you could see that the four men behind the glass panes had large swellings, wounds and bruises on their faces.
One of them had a bandage around his ear. In a video allegedly leaked by the Russian security service, you can see how he has parts of his ear cut off and stuffed in his mouth during the arrest.
Another image on the web showed one of the suspects lying on the floor with his pants down around his ankles and wires attached to his genitals.
Only three of the men entered the court themselves. The fourth, a 19-year-old man, was wheeled into a wheelchair and was only partially conscious.
DR has chosen to blur the faces of the four men, as they have not yet been sentenced.
Natalia Prilutskaya is Amnesty International’s Russia researcher. She has no doubt that the four suspects have been subjected to torture and believes that Russia has “crossed a red line”.
– In the past, people used to deny torture or hide and hide the victims of torture. But now the Russian authorities have almost made a parade out of it. It is a very worrying sign for the Russian legal system, she says to P1 Morgen .
Jens Modvig, senior physician at the Danish Institute Against Torture, Dignity, and former chairman of the UN’s torture committee, thinks the same.
– You actually get the impression that the Russian state is interested in exhibiting this brutal treatment that they have apparently been subjected to. Nothing has been done to hide it, he says.
The Kremlin has not wanted to answer questions about whether the men have been subjected to torture, writes the BBC .
