Dead prisoner’s organs ‘raided in Russia before corpse sent back to family’

A dead Russian prisoner was sent back to his family without his organs, his brother has said.

Horrific footage has emerged of Vazha Bochorishvili being beaten by guards as he lied naked on a wooden table at a notorious “torture jail”.

The 35-year-old thief was shown falling unconscious as he screamed for his abusers to stop before an off-screen voice urged: “Harder! Harder!”

The Georgian citizen, who was half-way through a three-and-a-half year sentence, died after being placed in solitary confinement.

His brother said his body was sent to his family without internal organs, the Times reports.

Footage apparently from a guard’s body-cam camera showed another prisoner being tortured at the Yaroslavl IK-1 prison, north of Moscow.

The man was also humiliated and beaten with truncheons by guards after he reportedly complained they had thrown his copy of the Koran to the ground. He spent the next two weeks in hospital.

The two clips were dated from 2016 and 2017 released by the independent human rights group Public Verdict Foundation.

The Kremlin has labelled it a “foreign agent”.

It comes after a leaked torture video from the penal colony in 2018 resulted in several officials being dismissed or charged.

Officials claim to be examining the new clips.

The Sun reports Sergey Efremov – nicknamed SS for his habit of beating prisoners in the ears – was believed to have been involved in torturing Bochorishvili, according to former inmates.

He was previously sentenced to a four year term for abuse of office in punishing prisoners, later reduced to three and a half years.

The footage emerged after officers at the jail were given suspended sentences in relation to previous allegations of torture, amid claims that authorities have been soft on prison brutality.

An appeal against the verdict concerning former jail staff Maxim Yablokov, Roman Onypa and Vladislav Pisarevsky has been sent by the foundation to European Court of Human Rights.

The jail’s former acting governor Dmitry Nikolaev – in charge at the time these videos were made – was acquitted in a previous torture case.