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• Topics / Freedom of expression

Police beat up a Channel 5 journalist

31.01.2011    source: ukranews.com
TV Channel 5’s correspondent in Poltava, Yury Stetsenko, was hospitalized on 28 January after being beaten by officers of the Poltava Regional Police who had tried to force him to confess to stealing a tractor

Ukrainian News, citing the journalist himself, report that TV Channel 5’s correspondent in Poltava, Yury Stetsenko, was hospitalized on 28 January after being beaten by officers of the Poltava Regional Police.

Mr Stetsenko relates that at around 15.00 on 28 January he was abducted by CID officers near the Poltava City Department of Justice.

“When I came out of the building, two strangers ran up to me, hit me on the head several times and I lost consciousness.”

When he came to, he found himself in a gray Daewoo car and CID officer Artyom Mochalov, who is known to him, was driving him towards the back entrance of the City Police Department on Skovoroda St.

“They dragged me up to the second floor into their office and turned off my mobile telephone”, he says.

The police officers demanded that he sign a statement confessing to having stolen a tractor.  After he refused they spent four hours beating him around the head and body from his backside.  They just laughed when Stetsenko showed them his journalist ID.

He was released, and hospitalized in the surgical department of Poltava Hospital No. 2 where the doctors diagnosed a fractured rib, concussion and numerous soft tissue contusions around the stomach and back.

The journalist’s father has lodged a complaint against the unlawful actions of police officers to the Poltava Prosecutor, and the regional departments of the Security Service [SBU] and the Ministry of Internal Affairs [MIA].

The Head of the Public Liaison Department of the Poltava Regional MIA, Yury Supayev confirmed that the beating had taken place and said that at the present, officers of the Regional MIA Department of Internal Security were investigating the matter.

At the end of September 2010 police in Donetsk brutally beat up journalist Artyom Furmanyuk .The journalist alleges that the police was brought to the ground face down, had handcuffs put on him and was then kicked and beaten with rubber batons by several police officers. The Donetsk Regional MIA asserted that use of force had been lawful.

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