Human rights group Amnesty International will study the recently revealed information about a secret jail located at the Mariupol airport that is run by Ukraine's special operations Azov Battalion under the auspices of the country's Security Service (SBU), Maria Guryeva, media and communications officer of Amnesty International Ukraine, told Sputnik
KIEV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th July, 2019) Human rights group Amnesty International will study the recently revealed information about a secret jail located at the Mariupol airport that is run by Ukraine's special operations Azov Battalion under the auspices of the country's Security Service (SBU), Maria Guryeva, media and communications officer of Amnesty International Ukraine, told Sputnik.On Wednesday, Sputnik said it had proof of the existence of the secret prison. The news agency said that it had interviewed both ex-prisoners and prison staff and possessed video materials and medical evidence, provided both by Ukraine and the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, substantiating the interviews. Sputnik also said that the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine had confirmed the existence of this jail.
"I am hearing about that for the first time. We do not have such information. I will send it to our researches so that they could look into this. I cannot say anything else about it," Guryeva said.
She noted that the watchdog had carried out an investigation into a similar situation in 2016.
"If this is what I think it is, then this is our 2016 study. We then released a study called 'You Don't Exist' in which we talked about such special places to keep people without communication with the rest of the world. One such facility was located in Kharkov. We also found certain places in Mariupol and other cities, but the main facility was in the Kharkiv office of the SBU, where people said they had been held for over a year. There are now a couple of legal processes in progress, but we do not have new information in this regard," Guryeva added.
Sputnik also reported it had obtained an SBU document that showed that the jail had operated until at least November 2018. In its investigation, Sputnik found no facts pointing to the jail terminating its operations since then and found that the SBU tried to conceal information leaks about the secret prison. Former detainees told Sputnik how they had been tortured there, including by a Ukrainian lawmaker, and detailed the locations at the Mariupol airport where the detainees who did not survive were buried.
