Moscow jail employees remanded in custody for extorting 10 mln rubles from inmate - investigators
MOSCOW. May 22 (Interfax) - A Moscow court has ordered that several employees of the city's Matrosskaya Tishina remand center accused of threatening to toughen confinement conditions for an inmate unless he pays ten million rubles be held in custody, the Russian Investigative Committee has said.
"All members of this criminal group have already been charged and remanded in custody as a restraining measure," the committee said in a press release seen by Interfax on Friday.
The suspects remanded in custody include former head of the detention facility's operations department Mikhail Zakharov, guards Pavel Petran, Valentin Bazayev and Anton Devyatayev, former employee of Matrosskaya Tishina Anatoly Osmachko and Moscow clinic radiologist Fatima Naifonova.
A total of seven people face accusations as part of the Matrosskaya Tishina extortion case. The seventh suspect, 'crime boss' Eldar Vekua, is already being held in custody as part of another investigation.
Investigators believe that Zakharov set up this criminal group and invited three of his subordinates, the detention center's former employee and Naifonova to join it.
From December 31, 2014 to January 26, 2015, the suspects tried to extort 11.5 million rubles from a businessman held in the Matrosskaya Tishina remand center for his suspected involvement in fraud during the construction of an airport in Kazan, the capital of Russia's Republic of Tatarstan. The inmate's father then transferred one million rubles to Naifonova's bank card.
Russian Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin earlier announced the detention of three employees of the Matrosskaya Tishina remand center and two men who worked there previously as part of an extortion inquiry.
Investigators accuse the detention facility's employees of entering into a criminal conspiracy with a 'crime boss' already being held there in order to extort money from inmates suspected of committing economic crimes.
"By threatening bodily harm and by creating unbearable conditions for other inmates, the suspects demanded that they transfer more than ten million rubles to bank cards belonging to their accomplices," Markin said.