Russia lauding torture was unthinkable – now it is proud to do so
There was no attempt to hide the evidence of torture. In fact, its perpetrators – serving officers in the Russian military and intelligence services – may have already received state awards for bravery.
By the time the men accused of murdering 137 people at a concert on Friday night appeared in court in Moscow on Sunday, their faces were swollen and disfigured, their eyes vacant.
One, named as Saidakrami Murodali Rachabalizoda, arrived with gauze over his ear. A video released online showed one of his captors, who appeared to be Russian military personnel, slicing off his ear and shoving it in his mouth, telling him to eat it. Others beat him with their rifle butts.
After his arrest, Shamsidin Fariduni appeared in a photo lying on the floor of a school gym, his pants pulled down around his knees and with wires connected his genital area. The photograph was published by a Telegram channel connected to the Wagner paramilitary group and suggested Fariduni had been shocked with 80 volts and water had been poured over his body to “intensify the effect”.
Dalerdzhon Barotovich Mirzoyev arrived with new bruises after his interrogation. He also had a plastic bag wrapped around his neck that observers think might have been used to asphyxiate him.
Muhammadsobir Fayzov was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair and appeared to lose consciousness during the hearing. Photographs circulating online appeared to show that one of his eyes was missing, Reuters reported.
There is little to no sympathy in
Russia for the gunmen who stormed the Crocus City Hall on Friday night and carried out the worst terrorist attack on Russian soil since the Beslan school siege of 2004.
Video filmed by the men themselves and published by Islamic State shows them cold-bloodedly killing wounded men and women attending a rock concert as they urged themselves on to “show no mercy” and “kill them all”.
But the promotion of the suspects’ brutal treatment by law enforcement and high-ranking Russian officials after their capture has surprised even seasoned observers of the Russian security services.
After two years of war in Ukraine, videos of death and torture have become commonplace in Russia. And methods of torture once only spoken about in witness testimonials are now being promoted online by the perpetrators themselves as they publish photos and videos of brutality for bragging rights.
Human rights researchers said that it was no revelation that Russian security services employ torture against terror suspects. In 2017, after an IS bombing of a St Petersburg Metro station, Human Rights Watch found that one suspect during his detention was threatened with rape with a stick; two were given electric shocks to their genitals.
But those facts were uncovered via testimony to researchers, and not released as videos by the torturers themselves.
“What is different now is the clear demonstrative nature of the torture,” said Tanya Lokshina, the Europe and central Asia associate director at Human Rights Watch. “The footage of the torture seems to be shared not by accident, but in order to warn others who are planning attacks on Russia that they will face the same consequences. The Russian authorities are no longer shy about showing that its security services torture people. There are no window dressing exercises any more.
“Such videos show the level to which violence has become normalised in Russia over the past two years of war; previously, there were widespread allegations of systematic torture by Russian law enforcement, but it would have been unthinkable for them to proudly publicise the video evidence.”
The Crew Against Torture, a Russian NGO that was previously known as the Committee Against Torture, said that “all those responsible must be punished for this crime”.
In fact, the opposite has happened. The Russian defence ministry on Monday released footage of an awards ceremony showing several members of an elite border unit who caught the gunmen and might have taken part in their brutal treatment.
VChK-OGPU, a Telegram account that regularly leaks information from the Russian intelligence services, said that military personnel in the border guard cut off Rachabalizoda’s ear. Members of the FSB security service and GRU military intelligence also engaged in torture. “They all ‘had fun’ with the terrorists as much as they could,” it claimed.
The commander of the Leningrad military district “presented well-deserved awards to the servicemen and personally congratulated everyone”. The men received medals “for Bravery” and “for military distinctions”.
As Russia seeks pretexts to blame the terrorist attack on Ukraine, Lokshina noted that forced confessions received by torture are notoriously untrustworthy. “It is obvious that any evidence given under torture cannot be viewed as trustworthy,” she said. “Someone who has electric shock wires attached to their genitals will pretty much confess to anything.”
The Kremlin declined to respond to allegations that the men had been tortured.
Russian officials have publicly lauded the brutal treatment of the suspects. The Russian prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, said the suspects “deserve no mercy”.
“Well done to all those who caught them,” said ex-president Dmitry Medvedev.
He added: “Should they be killed? They should be. And will be. But it’s much more important to kill everyone involved. Everyone. Those who paid, who sympathised with them, who helped them. Kill them all.”
As a result of the attack, some Russian MPs have called for the reinstitution of the death penalty. There has been a moratorium on executions since 1996. Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov distanced the Kremlin from such calls, saying: “We are not taking part in the discussion at the moment.”
The officer who cut off Rachabalizoda’s ear had military patches including a far-right Totenkopf (dead person’s head) previously worn by Nazi SS units.
The knife he used has been auctioned off online as the “ear-cutter”, according to Evgeny Rasskazov, a member of the far-right paramilitary battalion Rusich, who facilitated the sale.
“The auction is closed, the lot was sold by the [state] employee privately,” he wrote. “Congratulations to the lucky owner of the ear-cutter. ࡅ”
city limits,” a city employee wrote in a 22 January email.
Ken Salsman, chief technology officer for Ash Sensors, said his company, which specializes in sensors that monitor the structural health of buildings, had not explored homelessness detection before learning of San Jose’s pilot. The experiment provided an opportunity to create potentially marketable technologies by solving challenging computer vision problems, such as distinguishing an empty RV parked outside a home from an RV that is a home. He said the company was training its algorithms to detect proxy signs of habitation.
“Are the windows covered inside the vehicle? Are there towels to provide privacy? Is there trash outside the vehicle, suggesting they’re using food and having trouble getting rid of the waste?” Salsman said. He added that successful detection of lived-in vehicles would probably require frequent scanning of city streets in order to establish whether the vehicles have moved.
A report from the company Sensen.AI shows that its system detected 10 lived-in vehicles in footage collected from two streets on 8 February. Several of the vehicles pictured in the report have tarps spread across windows or rolled up and tied to them. Another has traffic cones next to it. Sensen.AI did not respond to a request for comment.
Tawfik said the goal of the pilot was to encourage companies to build algorithmic models that could detect a variety of different objects from carmounted cameras with at least 70% accuracy. The participating companies are currently detecting lived-in RVs with between 70 and 75% accuracy, he said, but the accuracy for lived-in cars is still far lower: between 10 and 15%. City staff are following the route of the camera-equipped car and confirming that the vehicles are occupied.
‘We’re not detecting folks. We’re detecting encampments’
City documents state that, in addition to accuracy, one of the main metrics the AI systems will be assessed on is their ability to preserve the privacy of people captured on camera – for example, by blurring faces and license plates. Tawfik said that the city did not “capture or retain images of individuals” through the pilot and that “the data is intended for [the city’s housing and parks departments] to provide services”.
The data use policy for the pilot states that the footage cannot be actively monitored for law enforcement purposes, but that police may request access to previously stored footage.
“We’re not detecting folks,” Tawfik said. “We’re detecting encampments. So the interest is not identifying people because that will be a violation of privacy.” However, in its report identifying lived-in vehicles, Sensen.AI wrote that its system included optical character recognition of the vehicles’ license plate numbers.
Tawfik said San Jose had delayed its release of a citywide AI policy in part to allow the department to examine its proposed guardrails through the lens of the object detection pilot.
Residents have complained to the city’s 311 phone line about homeless encampments 914 times so far in 2024. They reported illegal dumping 6,247 times, graffiti 5,666 times, and potholes 769 times last year. The goal of the surveillance pilot is to address these complaints more efficiently, according to Tawfik.
According to Tawfik, the city’s response might include sending outreach workers to visit a single tent before it can grow into an encampment, he said. The San Jose housing department and non-profits providing aid to unhoused people said they had not been involved in the pilot.
“Our ability to help the individuals directly is not really part of the pilot,” Tawfik said. “We’re still learning what can be done. And then once the program is mature, then we can look at the data and see what makes sense.”
That approach worries people like Thomas Knight, who was formerly unhoused and now serves as executive member of the Lived Experience Advisory Board of Silicon Valley. The group, made up of dozens of current and formerly unhoused people, has recently been fighting a policy proposed last August by the San Jose mayor, Matt Mahan, that would allow police to tow and impound lived-in vehicles near schools.
“If their whole purpose is to better provide responses to calls to 311, then that means that this computer system is going to identify tents and lived-in vehicles that are in places that the city has deemed they shouldn’t be,” Knight said. “The truth is, the only people you’re going to be able to give [that data] to to fix the issue is the police department.”
San Jose is one of the least affordable housing markets in the country. In order to afford the average effective monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city, a renter would have to earn $96,000 a year, according to the latest available data. The city’s unhoused population has grown from approximately 4,200 people in 2009 to more than 6,200 in 2023. More than two-thirds of those people are living outdoors and in vehicles rather than the city’s overwhelmed shelter system.
Amid a lack of temporary shelter beds and permanent affordable housing, San Jose officials have cracked down on tent encampments and people living in cars and RVs. Housing advocates fear that identification of encampments by roving AI would add to those efforts.
“The approach to homelessness is to treat unhoused people as blight consistent with trash or graffiti,” said Tristia Bauman, directing attorney for housing at the non-profit Law Foundation of Silicon Valley.
Last fall, the city cleared dozens of people out of tents and vehicles along a half-mile stretch of the downtown Guadalupe River trail and then announced plans for a “no return zone”. This year, police distributed 72-hour notices ordering people to leave a nearby encampment in Columbus Park in order to clear space for the opening of a five-acre dog park.
San Jose: a technological bellwether
In addition to providing a training ground for new algorithms, San Jose’s position as a national leader on government procurement of technology means that its experiment with surveilling encampments could influence whether and how other cities adopt similar detection systems. The city’s IT department is leading a national coalition of more than 150 municipal agencies working to develop policies for “responsible and purposeful” deployment of AI technologies in the public sector.
Tawfik said his staff had discussed the object detection pilot with coalition members and hoped that other agencies would participate in the review process. Companies participating in the pilot have also expressed interest in the “scalability” potential the coalition represents, according to emails they sent to IT department staff.
“As we see more interest from other cities to participate, we’re sharing notes and hopefully that advances the program faster,” Tawfik said.
Knight, from the Advisory Board, said the city’s focus on perfecting a technological solution ignored the root cause of the housing crisis in San Jose.
“If you have no place to put people, it’s pretty much useless,” he said.
prison before the then president commuted the sentence.
The rapper Kurt Jantz, professionally known as Forgiato Blow, was also at the Super Tuesday event. His Maga songs have been criticised for homophobia and glorifying violence and he has suffered social media bans. Blow said: “He’s the American dream. I supported Trump since 2015. I was one of the people early about it. At first it was just about Trump being a boss but he’s a rapper’s dream: beautiful wife, amazing mansion that we’re in right now. At the end of the day, that’s what everybody wants.”
The rush of would-be influencers eager to whisper unsolicited advice into Trump’s ear is making life difficult for his otherwise unexpectedly professional campaign led by the longtime political operatives Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who find themselves attempting to play gatekeeper.
Christina Bobb, a lawyer and former One America News Network (OAN) host who amplified Trump’s false claims of election fraud, faced questions over her competence at the campaign. She has been diverted to the
RNC as senior counsel for “election integrity”.
Trump reportedly wanted to hire the far-right activist Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist, Islamophobe and former Republican candidate for Congress, but Wiles managed to block the move, according to the Axios website.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative columnist and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “In a normal world, a presidential candidate would not get within a zip code of Laura Loomer. Now she’s showing up at Mar-a-Lago. And, of course, they can be relied upon to attack any other conservative that does not engage in the kind of rhetoric that Trump engages in.”
But Trump continues to speak by phone to some without the knowledge of his campaign. Their indulgence is seen by critics as an ominous indicator that, should he return to the White House, Trump would make appointments based only on loyalty and Maga credentials, a break from his first term when figures such as the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, and defence secretary, Jim Mattis, sought to rein him in.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance
at the University of Minnesota, said: Trump has made it clear that he was disappointed and fed up with the Washington establishment, as he calls it, and so he’s got a group of henchmen and women who will do his bidding, who don’t feel bound by the law or being liked and respected outside their core.
“These are the foot soldiers in Trump’s authoritarian army. They will do whatever it takes to win and we’ve seen it; this is not speculation. They put out the playbook in 2020 and we’d be foolish not to expect that playbook to be used in 2024.”