Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

The Russians murdered my husband – and I could be next: Widow of Kremlin whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky reveals she fled to London in fear of her life

Mail on Sunday

The contents of the food parcel Natasha Magnitsky packed for husband Sergei were achingly spare: tea, sugar, biscuits and bread, a few carrots and turnips to bolster his prison diet, and some caramel as a treat. But when she attempted to hand them in at the little hatch in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison, a female official snapped: ‘No, he’s gone.’

Terrified that Butyrka’s squalid conditions – raw sewage running through the cells, a shift system for beds – had made him sick, Sergei’s mother Nataliya dashed to Matrosskaya Tishina, a prison in northern Moscow where there was a medical unit, while Natasha went to work.

At the prison, the official at the parcel desk was rather more specific: Sergei, an accountant who’d blown the whistle on a £150 million corruption scandal that stopped at the door of the Kremlin, was dead.
‘We had been a fortress, we two,’ says Natasha, who has since fled to London with the couple’s 12-year-old son. ‘Our marriage, our family was our life. In that moment my world and my belief system disintegrated around me. The fortress crumbled.

‘The last thing he said to me the night he was arrested was, “Don’t worry, I’ll be home tomorrow.” Right to the end he believed innocence could always be proved, but now I understand that nobody is safe. The unimaginable happened to my husband – why couldn’t it also happen to me?’

Traditionally, people are sent to prison because they’ve committed a crime. Sergei, 37, found himself locked away because he uncovered one. He was the auditor who followed an extraordinary paper trail that led from an illegal Interior Ministry raid on the Moscow offices of a London investment company to law enforcers, judiciary, bankers and mobsters.

He was incarcerated for a year without trial and investigated by those with a vested interest in closing down his inquiries. A week before his family were expecting his release he died, officially of heart failure and toxic shock from untreated pancreatitis, but also from brutal beatings. America led world condemnation of the best-documented abuse of human rights to emerge from Russia in the past 25 years. It led to the Magnitsky Act, allowing the US to withhold visas and freeze the financial assets of the Russian officials involved.

Russia retaliated by posthumously prosecuting Sergei for complicity in the tax fraud he revealed. His corpse was found guilty last month and his name has now joined the growing list of other brave citizens, from the late dissident Alexander Litvinenko to the young mothers of the anti-establishment pop group Pussy Riot, who are Russia’s very modern martyrs.