Criminal case opened into the murder of a prisoner in a colony near Kyiv

The Prosecutor's Office has opened a criminal case in connection with the death of a convict at the Bucha Correctional Colony. As reported by TSN, the body of Taras Voytsekhovsky was released to his mother for burial five days after his death.
On 21 March, the prosecutor of the city of Irpin, with the aim of clarifying the circumstances of the convict's death, opened a criminal case under Article 115, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (Murder, that is, the intentional, unlawful causing of the death of another person, punishable by imprisonment for a term of seven to fifteen years).

The pre-trial investigation has been entrusted to the Irpin City Department of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine in the Kyiv region.

As reported by TSN, the body of the deceased prisoner was released to his mother for burial. All this time, the colony noted, a forensic medical examination was being conducted. According to the findings, the 26-year-old man died of haemorrhagic pancreatitis.

However, his relatives, TSN writes, were shocked when they saw the body of the deceased. “His beard, everything here is smashed to pieces; you can see he was beaten with feet or hands. We were told his pancreas had failed. He never had such a disease; he was healthy, normal,” reported Taras’s mother, Svetlana Voytsekhovskaya.

TSN notes that the doctors' conclusion fully supports the official version of the Prosecutor's Office that the young man allegedly died in the detention centre, where he had been transferred the day before for being intoxicated.

Earlier, human rights activists reported that staff at the Bucha Correctional Colony, located in Hostomel in the Kyiv region, had beaten two prisoners. One of them died on the night of 16–17 March in the colony's disciplinary isolation cell. Meanwhile, the State Penitentiary Service denies that the prisoner’s death was violent, stating that the cause of death was haemorrhagic pancreatitis.