An ex-officer from Russia’s top domestic security agency, who was serving a four-year sentence for torturing a businessman – sexually assaulting him with a carbine rifle – has reportedly been released on parole ahead of schedule.
On Friday, Fontanka reported that a judge in Kirov Oblast released Ilya Kirsanov, a 29-year-old former operative of the Petrograd District Department of the St. Petersburg FSB, after he served less than two years and four months of his sentence.
In September 2019, the Vyborg Garrison Military Court sentenced Kirsanov to four years in a general regime colony for violent acts against businessman Igor Salikov during a search of his home in the Leningrad region.
Kirsanov is said to have thrown the owner of the house to the floor the year before, handcuffing him and sexually assaulting him with the barrel of a hunting rifle. The officers at the scene insisted, however, that the businessman took the weapon and mutilated himself.
The investigation of Salikov’s residence was cut short as he was taken for medical assistance in an ambulance and was required to undergo several operations. The businessman spent several months in hospital and became disabled. Kirsanov was ordered to pay $10,800 to compensate his victim.
Kirsanov’s conviction was said to be the country’s first conviction on the same charges against a security official by experts from Russia’s Committee Against Torture. Tatyana Glushkova, a lawyer who worked for the now-liquidated human rights organization Memorial – registered as a ‘foreign agent’ over links to overseas funding – said at the time that the case against an “FSB officer sets a precedent in Russia.”
Shocking scenes allegedly depicting rape and torture in the country’s prisons have surfaced in recent months. Over a thousand videos were leaked to Gulagu.net purporting to prove that hundreds of people have been subject to humiliating and illegal treatment. One shows a man tied to a bed, his face covered and his legs lifted in the air while a group of men violate him with a stick.
More than a dozen officers have been fired amid a probe into the chilling clips, and the Kremlin has dismissed Alexander Kalashnikov, the director of the federal prisons system.