He is at the origin of an unprecedented leak of videos of organized rape and torture in Russian prisons: after an incredible journey, Belarusian Sergei Savelev asks for asylum in France.
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Passed through Istanbul and Tunis, the 31-year-old ex-detainee arrived in the night from Friday to Saturday, October 16 in Roissy, where AFP met him on Sunday in the waiting zone for asylum seekers.
"
He was authorized to enter French territory to submit his asylum application within eight days,
" his lawyer, Me Aude Rimailho, told AFP on Monday evening.
Leaked videos of organized rape and torture
At the beginning of October, unbearable images of a prisoner being raped using a long pole in a prison-hospital in Saratov caused a scandal in Russia.
Four regional prison officials are sacked, and even the Kremlin spokesperson is forced to respond to the horror.
It was in this establishment that Sergei Savelev was imprisoned, convicted in a case of drug trafficking.
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This is also where, under the guise of his computer maintenance functions, he patiently and discreetly downloads video files from prisons all over Russia, these being linked together by an intranet. "
At the beginning, they controlled me then this surveillance gradually relaxed until it disappeared,
" says this frail and shy man.
The NGO Gulagu.net, which published the images of Saratov, explains that Sergei Savelev gave him a number of videos, proving the systemic nature of the mistreatment in Russian jails.
Sergey Savelev recounts having succeeded, shortly before his release in early February 2021, to conceal the media on which he recorded data near his exit from prison.
The day of his release, after having been thoroughly searched, he retrieves them, neither seen nor known, in the confusion of a mass departure.
A powerful means of blackmail
One scenario consists of filming sexual abuse inflicted on a victim, then the video serves as a means of blackmail for the tortured inmate to cooperate. Sergei says he suffered ill-treatment in a Krasnodar prison so that he “
cooperates
”, without knowing the worst. And he claims to have never taken part in violence against other detainees. Blows, he received "
about once a week but not too strong to avoid too visible bruises
." To describe the psychological pressures, he tells this anecdote: “
My father traveled 1000 km to bring sausage to his son. He tried one day, then the next day he slept in his car for three nights and they wouldn't let him in
”.
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His psychologist in Minsk “
was horrified by what I was telling him.
He organized sessions but nothing helped
”, says Sergei,“
he prescribed me some pills, then others and others more powerful yet but none of that gave me any relief
”.
For having stolen and distributed the videos illustrating this system, Sergei Savelev, who seeks asylum in France, says he now fears reprisals from the Russian prison administration (FSIN) and the security services (FSB).
A long journey
He says he narrowly escaped them in Russia, assuring that agents had offered him, in exchange for his cooperation, four years in prison for "
revealing a state secret
" rather than 10 to 20 years for espionage.
"They were
not interested in knowing that there were human rights violations
."
To escape them, he climbs into a "
marchroutka
", a minibus that takes him to Minsk, passing through the porous Russian-Belarusian border.
As cooperation between Russian and Belarusian law enforcement authorities was in order, upon his arrival in Belarus at the end of September, he flew to Istanbul and then Tunis, a country where no visa was required.
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There, in quarantine in a hotel, he takes a ticket to return to Minsk with a stopover at Charles-de-Gaulle.
Arrived at Roissy, he puts an end to the journey and declares to seek asylum.
"
He has the profile of a person who may be the subject of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial execution so the fears are serious,
" said his lawyer.
