TORTURED PRISONERS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIII, Issue 14, 14 May 1912, Page 7

TORTURED PRISONERS.

Two non-com mission eel officers of gendarmery and a peasant have been tried at Klisabetgrad before the Odessa Circuit Court on the charge of savagely maltreating a prisoner, with tin 1 result that he died from his injuries. The prisoner—a peasant—was accused of having solon the fur coat of a railway traveller. Ho stoutly denied his guilt. In order to extort a confession, the two gendarmes, aided by a

peasant'whose services they enlisted, pounded him with their lists, kicked him, struck him with a poker, and burned his body with a red-hot soldering iron. Unable to stand the torture, tilt* prisoner at length said that he had stolen the coat and had hidden it in a certain barn. As it was not found there the gendarmes recommenced their barbarities, and inflicted such injuries on their victim that lie died the same night. The medical evidence

showed that the bones of both forearms were broken, and that the body was a mass of burns and contusions. The gendarmes were sentenced to two and a half and one year’s imprisonment respectively.

Similar stories of the maltreatment of prisoners come from Smolensk. A boy of i I recently hanged himself owing to ill’s mind becoming unhinged by tin* brutality to which lie was subjected. He had been accused—appar-

ently wrongfully—of some petty theft. He was flogged and beaten by a police officer and a rural guard, and for four days was attached to the shafts of a cart and forced to keep pace with the horse. A doctor testified that lie had found eleven weals on the liny’s body. The police officer was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. The rural guard was acquitted.