Case History Bahromiddin Shodiev

Dushanbe, 17 October 2011. On that day three plainclothes policemen, accompanied by the local precinct police inspector, apprehended 28-year old Bahromiddin Shodiev in the entrance to his block of flats and drove him to the Shomansur District police department in the capital. Some time later the police phoned the mother of the detained and demanded that she bring 800 somonis, money she was supposed to have paid that day at the clinic where her son was undergoing treatment. Bahromiddin had been addicted to drugs for a long time and on that morning, after a particularly bad night, had persuaded his mother to take him to the rehab clinic. He had apparently mentioned the existence of the money at the police station. The policemen told Shodiev’s mother that the money had been stolen and would have to be kept at the police station as evidence.

The woman had only one wish – that her son is released – and so she went to the police station immediately and gave the officers 800 somonis. She didn’t understand legal matters and that is why it didn’t occur to her to ask for a receipt. Incidentally, no trace of this money has ever been found and she has never seen it again.

Shodiev was held at the police station for three days and during this time his family was not allowed to see him. On 20 October the detainee was taken, unconscious, to the reanimation unit of the Karabolo National Medical Centre. Parental consent was needed for emergency operation surgery to treat a grave traumatic brain injury. The police was compelled to inform Shodiev’s mother that her son was critically ill in hospital.

A day after the operation Bahromihddin regained consciousness and was moved to a general ward where he remained under police surveillance. The whole time he was there his mother didn’t leave his bedside and Bahromiddin, as if sensing these were his last moments with his mother, gave her affectionate hugs and pulled her ear the way he used to when he was a little boy. A strange premonition wrung her heart but she tried to chase the black thoughts away.

Throughout this period mother and son practically didn’t part. Fighting weakness and pain, Bahromiddin wanted to tell her a lot, but his mother was worried about his condition and begged her son not to talk too much and not to exert himself.

In spite of that he told his mother about the brutal beating by the police who had tried to make him confess to crimes he had not committed. He told her he had been given electric shocks while his mouth was covered with tape so that no one could hear his scream. Speaking in half whispers, Bahromiddin told his mother that, while more or less unconscious, he nevertheless heard the policemen say to each other: “If necessary we’ll say the detainee was injured when he threw himself out of the second floor window of the police station.”

The policemen on duty overheard this conversation and got visibly agitated. As soon as the mother said goodbye to her son and left the ward, he took off a shoe and hit Shodiev across the mouth.

The next day Bahromiddin told his mother what had happened and begged her to stop visiting him at the ward for fear that “they would beat him again”. A few days later his condition deteriorated and he was taken back to the reanimation unit. On 30 October he died without regaining consciousness.

Newspapers reported the tragic incident, demanding a response from the law enforcement agenciesas well as a thorough investigation. In an official statement the Tajikistan Ministry of Internal Affairs claimed that Shodiev had thrown himself out of the second floor window after being detained and brought to the police station. Bahromiddin’s relatives are convinced that this is a lie and that the young man had suffered brutal beating and torture at the police station.

On 4 November 2011 Tajikistan MIA announced that three officers had been fired from the Shohmansur police station as a result of an internal enquiry relating to the death of the detained Bahromiddin Shodiev. The deputy chief of the police station had been demoted and his immediate superior received a severe reprimand.

A criminal investigation was opened against police officer Abdurahmon Dodov who was in charge of investigating the crimes Shodiev had been accused of, as well as against two other police officers.

Local human rights organisations got involved at this stage and called for a fair investigation. They concluded that “this was not the first time the authorities had officially claimed that a detainee had died in an attempt to jump out of the second floor window of the police station.”

By then human rights organizations were the only hope left for the relatives of the young victim.   The Office for Human Rights and the Observance of Law provided them with a pro bono lawyer. The uneven fight with the powerful apparatus began. The defence lawyer tried to have the charges re-qualified from “negligence” to “abuse of power” but in vain.

A few days after the court case opened on 17 February 2012 the judge sent the case back to the prosecutor for additional investigation at the request of the aggrieved party’s lawyer. In the course of the fresh investigation one part of the case relating to two police officers, was dropped “due to the absence of a crime”. As a result police officer Dodov was the only one who stood trial. He was found guilty of negligence resulting in the death of the detained Bahromiddin Shodiev and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in a corrective labour colony.

Gulchehra Holmatova, the lawyer representing the aggrieved party, called the court verdict “unjustified and unlawful”. In a media interview she said: “The charges brought against the defendant were wrong right from the. Furthermore, two other policemen remain unpunished, the charges against them dropped as their actions were found not to have amounted to a crime.”

“Bahromiddin was my first child,” remembers his mother, Niyozbibi Burieva. “From the moment he was born, on 2 July 1983, he was a beautiful baby. The doctors were so taken by the beauty of this child I had to put special beads on his little hand against evil eye.”

She recalls that Bahromiddin was an affectionate little boy, very attached to his mother. He loved to pull at her ear with this little hand while falling asleep and stroke her cheeks as he woke up. He loved his little brethren – stray dogs and cats. “They, too, are living beings and they also feel the tiniest pain”, little Bahromiddin used to say, protecting the animals from his naughty peers.

From an early age the boy loved to drum the rhythm of music on anything he could get his hands on: a book, the kitchen counter or the window-sill, and the whole family enjoyed the pleasant vibe. The father had no choice and had to buy Bahromiddin a tavlak, a traditional sheepskin drum. “My son was in first grade and his joy had no bounds, - Niyozbibi recalls. – Everyone thought he would grow up to be a real tavlak player.” 

But it wasn’t to be. In addition to Bahromiddin, the family raised four other children. With each passing year it was getting more and more difficult to make ends meet and the family budget was getting increasingly tight. In 2001, when he was barely eighteen, Bahromiddin and his mother left for Russia in search for work, as thousands of other young Tajiks before them.

Later on he returned home to unemployment and no prospects for the future. A trusting young man, he fell under the influence of some dubious characters and became addicted to drugs. Short of money to feed his habit, without known how it happened, Bahrom committed a theft. He was imprisoned and released in an amnesty. Another sentence for theft followed. This is a brief summary of these feverish years of Bahromiddin’s life. But there were good times, too – he got married, his first child was born…

In October 2011 Bahromiddin begged his mother to give him a last chance to resume normal life and asked her to pay for treatment in a rehab clinic. But then ill fate interfered with his plans…

“I find it very hard to recall those days that robbed me of my son,” says his mother. “Yes, he had stumbled in his life but that not a reason for the police to frame him, blaming him for 21 (!) counts of theft, in order to increase their crime solving rate at the expense of those who are weak and have previous convictions. Torture is the easiest way of obtaining a confession and closing a case. And Bahromiddin fell victim to this system.”

In November 2013, Ismoili Somoni district court of Dushanbe ordered the Ministry of Internal Affairs to pay 14 thousand somoni (at that time about 3 thousand US dollars) to the mother of Bahromiddin Shodiev for moral and physical damage. In February 2014 the prosecutor's office of Ismoili Somoni district tried to challenge the court's decision, though this initiative was rejected by the appeal board of the City Court.