Europe and Central Asia Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, January-June 2007 the prosecution had failed to establish the defendants’ guilt. Conviction of individuals murder of Roland Epossek for the On 19 June the St Petersburg City Court sentenced four men to terms of imprisonment ranging from seven to 14 years, for the murder of 29-year-old Congolese student Roland Epasak, beaten to death in September 2005. A jury had found the four men guilty of murder by a group, motivated by racial hatred (Article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code). The defendants had previously been acquitted in July 2006 but the prosecution had appealed the verdict. Investigation into murder of Lamsar Samba Sell, (update to AI Index: EUR 01/017/2006) Eleven individuals were reported to have been arrested in April in connection with the murder of Senegalese student, Lamsar Samba Sell, shot dead in St Petersburg in an apparent racist attack in April 2006. The attack has been investigated as racially motivated. The suspects remained in detention awaiting trial at the end of the period under review. Torture and ill-treatment AI continued to receive a number of reports of torture and other ill-treatment in police custody. According to information received from a human rights organization in Krasnodar Region, on 5 March Mikhail Sloian, who was working as head of a unit in a chemical factory in Belorechenska in the Krasnodar Region, was questioned by police regarding a theft in the factory. According to Mikhail Sloian’s parents, during the questioning, which was done by four police officers, he was handcuffed, beaten and tortured with electroshocks in order to make him sign a prepared statement admitting to the theft. Amnesty International 97 A gas-mask was put over his head and the air was cut off periodically. His father, who was looking for him after he did not return home from the questioning, found him late in the evening in the police station to which he had been called and took him to a hospital. He was diagnosed with compressed fractures to his spine in three places and injuries to his rib cage. Allegedly, the police made him sign a statement that he had self-inflicted these injuries. However, on 10 March a criminal case was opened and an investigation against the perpetrators initiated. Fair Trial concerns The case of Mikhail Khodorkovskii and Platon Lebedev (update to AI Indexes: EUR 01/002/2005, EUR 01/012/2005, EUR 01/017/2006) A court in Moscow, the Basmannyi District Court, ruled on 20 March that the decision by the Office of the Prosecutor General to hold the investigations of a further criminal case, opened against Mikhail Khodorkovskii and Platon Lebedev, in the town of Chita, eastern Siberia, was unlawful. The court ruled that the prosecutor’s office had failed to provide an adequate and reasoned explanation, as required by Russian law, as to why the case should be investigated in Chita, rather than in Moscow where the alleged crime was committed, as is standard practice. The court found that the failure to provide this explanation amounted to a violation of Mikhail Khodorkovskii’s and Platon Lebedev’s constitutional right to a defence. This decision was upheld by the Moscow City Court on 16 April when the decision entered into force. However, at the end of the period under review, the prosecutor’s office had failed to either provide an adequate explanation for the decision to hold the investigation in Chita, or move the investigation to Moscow. Not only was this failure by the prosecutor’s office to respect the decision of the Basmannyi District Court a serious violation of Russian procedure, and arbitrary in nature, AI was also AI Index: EUR 01/010/2007