Russia: Charges against Magnitskiy case doctors see mixed response

BBC

Medical officers Larisa Litvinova and Dmitriy Kratov from the Butyrka pre-trial detention centre have been charged with the manslaughter of Hermitage Capital fund lawyer Sergey Magnitskiy, the privately-owned Interfax news agency reported on 12 August. They are said to have been negligent in providing care to Magnitskiy before his transfer to the Matrosskaya Tishina remand centre, where he later died.

Litvinova and Kratov were among those identified by rights activists as being complicit in Magnitskiy’s death. The Russian rights activists, who were involved in the independent probe, have not responded with a great deal of enthusiasm, expressing concern that charges against Litvinova and Kratov will become something of a smoke screen.

The head of the presidential human rights council, Mikhail Fedotov, told Interfax on 12 August that the charges were “a step in the right direction”. Fedotov also called for all matters related to Magnitskiy’s death and the corruption allegations that he had made against law-enforcement officers to be considered by a single team of investigators so that “all threads of this tragic story may be joined together”.

Meanwhile, Gazprom-owned, editorially independent Ekho Moskvy radio on 13 August reported that the Hermitage Capital fund considers that “the charged doctors are mere scapegoats”. The head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, told Ekho Moskvy on the same day that charging Litvinova and Kratov was the authorities’ move to “artificially narrow the list of those guilty”.

Another veteran of the Russian rights movement, Valeriy Borshchev, said that the fact that charges had been presented to only two doctors was an indication that “there is no desire to find out the real reasons for Magnitskiy’s death,” Interfax reported on 12 August. He specifically highlighted that Aleksandra Gaus, the doctor at Matrosskaya Tishina, who saw Magnitskiy “during his last hour alive” had not been charged, but voiced hope that Litvinova and Kratov “will talk about the pressure that was exerted on them”.

Yelena Oreshnikova, lawyer of Sergey Magnitskiy’s wife, has welcomed the decision to charge the Butyrka doctors, but lamented the fact that no progress has been made on assessing the complicity of the investigator through negligence. “It is not just doctors who need to be charged. Other people are complicit in the death of Sergey Magnitskiy,” Interfax quoted Oreshnikova as saying on 12 August.

The state-owned RIA Novosti news agency reported on the same day that Oreshnikova said that “we expect that this [charging the doctors] is only the beginning”. срочный займ на карту онлайн быстрые займы онлайн https://zp-pdl.com/how-to-get-fast-payday-loan-online.php https://zp-pdl.com/how-to-get-fast-payday-loan-online.php unshaven girls