A U.S.-based advocacy group said Sunday that Russian authorities violated the rights of two former inmates at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, threatening and physically abusing the men to force them to confess to blowing up a natural gas pipeline and ignoring possibly exonerating evidence, The Associated Press reports.
Ravil Gumarov and Timur Ishmuratov were sentenced in May to 13 and 11 years, respectively, for the blast in the central Russian republic of Tatarstan after having been acquitted in a prior trial. Russian rights groups criticized their trial, saying that the jury was not swayed by defense evidence including mobile phone records and that evidence presented by prosecutors as proof of the terrorism charge included legally obtained Muslim literature.
New York-based Human Rights Watch also said that another man detained in connection with the January 2005 explosion confessed that he had planned and carried out the blast by himself, but prosecutors failed to mention the confession to defense lawyers.
In a development first reported by The Washington Post, prosecutors in Tatarstan, a largely Muslim region about 700 kilometers (450 miles) east of Moscow, said that suspect Vilsur Khairullin had been unable to provide specifics when brought to the site of the crime.
"All his claims were checked out," regional prosecutors' spokesman Eldar Mukhamediyarov told The Associated Press. "He could not confirm the place or the type of explosion."
Witnesses for the prosecution, meanwhile, reported being beaten and forced into testifying, Human Rights Watch said. A total of seven men from Russia and the former Soviet countries were detained in Afghanistan by U.S. forces on suspicion of fighting for the Taliban regime. They were released from Guantanamo in 2004 and some were briefly jailed upon returning to Russia. They were freed after Russian investigators found no evidence of their involvement with the Taliban.
In a statement released Sunday, Human Rights Watch said Gumarov told relatives that interrogators pulled hair from his beard and forced him to drink vodka, something highly offensive for observant Muslims. Ishmuratov's pregnant wife was threatened should he not cooperate with interrogators, the organization said.
Both men recanted their confessions in court, but the Tatarstan Supreme Court convicted them.
A representative of the Russian prosecutor general's office said it would not comment on Sunday, and prosecutors in Tatarstan could not be reached for comment.
Other former Guantanamo prisoners have faced harassment or abuse at the hands of Russian law enforcement agencies, which critics say are persecuting innocent Muslims in a misguided and counterproductive effort to check Islamic extremism. Rasul Kudayev, who lives just outside the troubled North Caucasus city of Nalchik, has been repeatedly detained and severely beaten by law enforcement agents, according to relatives.
Human Rights Watch added that U.S. Embassy officials in Moscow told it that no efforts were being made to monitor how former Guantanamo inmates were being treated.
"This case shows precisely why the U.S. government should be screening Guantanamo detainees before sending them home," said Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch. "Forcing people to go back to this kind of abuse is a clear violation of international law. Detainees at Guantanamo must have a chance to challenge their return."
Human Rights Watch said the U.S. was prohibited by international law from returning people to countries where they would be at risk of torture and that "diplomatic assurances" from countries such as Russia, where it said specific groups are targeted for torture, provide no protection.
Source: MosNews
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