The latest case of police brutality The ·Chorata Case” brought to light astonishing negligence in the work of the Interior Ministry, the investigative service and the prosecution in police brutality investigations
Rositsa STOYKOVA
O
n Thursday, 10 November 2005, at 9:00 pm, during a planned campaign carried out by the Blagoevgrad police code-named ·Respect,” 38-year-old Angel Dimitrov died as police were attempting to arrest him. Contrary to all expectations, the incident, which came to be known by the dead man’s nickname, ·Chorata,” did not play out according to the usual scenario for such ·incidents.” The first information to appear in the press regarding the death of Angel Dimitrov was all in agreement. According to the leading dailies, ·shortly after being handcuffed, the suspected criminal Angel Dimitrov suffered a cardiac arrest and died on the spot... The incident provoked an immediate inquiry by the military prosecutor and the investigative service, in order to establish to what extent the actions of the Blagoevgrad police had been justified. The autopsy established that it was not the police that had caused Chorata’s death.” (Trud newspaper, 12 November 2005). According to the police, after they had spotted Dimitrov driving on Doyran Street, he stopped his car and tried to flee. After four or five meters he was apprehended by three officers and two sergeants, who, after he began to resist violently, hit him several times until they were able to handcuff him. Then Dimitrov moaned and slid down to the ground. The police called an ambulance, but the physicians were only able to pronounce Dimitrov dead. On November 11, the chief of the Blagoevgrad Regional Directorate of Internal Affairs (RDIA), General Bogomil Yanev, held a special press conference at which he announced that according to the conclusions of the threemember panel of forensic pathologists who had conducted the medical inquiry, the police were not to blame for Dimitrov’s death. ·The autopsy of Angel Dimitrov’s body revealed that he had sustained trauma to the face from the actions of our officers, but this had no relationship to the cause of his subsequent death,” General Yanev said. Angel Dimitrov’s relatives scheduled his burial
for Saturday, November 12. Shortly before the departure of the mourning procession, they received a copy of the death certificate, which stated that Dimitrov had died from ·severe cardiac arrest and severe cardiovascular and respiratory insufficiency” and noted ·contusions and bruising on the head and body.” Since there were traces of a cruel beating all over Angel Dimitrov’s body and head, his relatives decided to postpone the burial in order to have a new forensic analysis. They leased a refrigerated compartment at the morgue of the local oncology clinic, where Angel Dimitrov’s body was preserved for one month. Dimitrov’s relatives claimed that he had died as a result of the police beating. This step, unprecedented in the history of police statistics in this country, reversed the results of the initial inquiry and the course of the investigation. On November 11, Dimitrov’s relatives filed a complaint with the Blagoevgrad Regional Prosecutor, with a request that an inquiry be made into the incident. On November 16, the family’s lawyer Iliya Yanev submitted a complaint to the investigative service and the prosecutor, requesting a new, independent, forensic expert analysis, which was carried out on November 19. On its part, the Interior Ministry launched two inquiries: one by the National Police Service Directorate and one by the Interior Ministry Inspectorate. The participants in Dimitrov’s arrest - officers Ivaylo Spassov, Borislav Mehandzhiev and Vladimir Savekliev, and special forces sergeants Yanko Grahovski and Georgi Klinkov from the Blagoevgrad RDIA - were questioned, but they were not suspended from duty. The story claiming that Dimitrov had died of natural causes was confirmed by the top leadership of the Interior Ministry. First, on November 21, the secretary-general of the Interior Ministry, General Iliya Iliev, announced the results of the internal inquiry of the Blagoevgrad RDIA, according to which the police officers had acted in a justified manner, and in compliance with the Ministry of Interior Act. According to the inquiry, Dimitrov had first failed to stop his car upon being shown the police stop-sign, and afterwards attempted to escape. He even struggled violently after the police had put handcuffs on him,
and for that reason it had been necessary to take ·subsequent actions.” The Minister of the Interior, General Rumen Petkov, made the laconic comment: ·I guarantee that the police do not beat people.” An inquiry carried out by Obektiv revealed several significant violations of the law during and after Angel Dimitrov’s arrest: First, the police officers sent after Dimitrov did not have an arrest warrant. According to the nowformer director of the Blagoevgrad RDIA, Gen. Bogomil Yanev, they were acting in accordance with Art. 191 of the Code of Criminal Procedure
blood off the pavement where he had been beaten. Third, the police officers used excessive force. This is clear from the wounds that can be seen on Angel Dimitrov’s head in the photographs published in the press. According to Dimitrov’s relatives, his entire body was covered with signs of the beating. This contradicts the claims made by the Interior Ministry, that the officers used force only until they had put the handcuffs on the detained man. Residents of the nearby apartment buildings, who went to look out their windows upon hearing Dimitrov’s cries for help,
(CCP), which provides the possibility for ·urgent investigative actions.” But since it was part of the planned ·Respect” operation, that should have obviated the applicability of such urgent actions. Second, Angel Dimitrov’s body was removed from the site of the incident by the emergency medical crew, despite the fact that the physicians had established lack of vital signs. Upon the insistence of the police officers, they took the body away in an ambulance, thus hindering the work of the investigative services. Eyewitnesses say the police officers also immediately called a watertank truck to the site to wash all traces of Dimitrov’s
also provided eyewitness accounts of the excessive use of force. According to one witness, Dimitrov begged the police to stop beating him because he could not breathe. The police officers stopped the beating for a while, and then resumed it again. Another witness called the police to report that several masked men were beating a man on the street, but he was ·reassured” that the action was being carried out by the Interior Ministry. Fourth, at the November 11 press conference, the then director of the Blagoevgrad RDIA Gen. Bogomil Yanev announced findings by the
forensic medical experts, while the autopsy results were not officially released until... December. He told Obektiv that he had personally called the forensic pathologists for information on the case, and that they had shared with him their ·own personal impressions.” Since the Interior Ministry was a party to the incident, such a move constitutes improper interference in the investigative process by a state official. Such interference, and the public announcement of nonexistent autopsy results, misled both the media, for whom the information was intended, as well as the top leadership of the Interior Ministry, which up until the announcements of the results of the second forensic expert analysis, continued to claim that the police were not to blame for Chorata’s death. The reversal in the attitude of the police came on December 7, when it was revealed that the second forensic medical analysis by a five-member panel indicated that Angel Dimitrov had died as the result of trauma wounds sustained at the time of his arrest (brain hemorrhaging), caused by the police beating. On December 8, Interior Minister Rumen Petkov apologized to Angel Dimitrov’s relatives. The resignations of the director of the Blagoevgrad RDIA, Gen. Bogomil Yanev, and the chief of the Regional Office for Combating Organized Crime, Alexander Kostov, were accepted. Surprisingly, however, on December 14 the Sofia District Military Prosecutor issued an order for the suspension of all criminal proceedings in the ·Chorata Case,” on the basis of CPC Art. 21, para. 1, Provision 1, in connection with Art. 12a of the Penal Code. The order reads: ·It has been unquestionably established that the police officers did not want the death of Dimitrov. Their aim was to detain him, not to kill him. In this incident the employees of the Interior Ministry did not foresee the emergence of consequences dangerous to the public, but they were bound by duty to do so and could have foreseen them. It was necessary to evaluate the situation carefully, both with regard to the force used in the blows administered to the body, etc. Art. 12a, para. 2 of the Penal Code provides that when the limits are overstepped in the apprehension of a criminal, then there should be criminal liability, but only if the harm was caused intentionally. And in this case the death was caused by lack of caution. Consequently, according to the law, the Interior Ministry employees in this case should not bear criminal responsibility for the death, for which reason the criminal proceedings shall hereby be discontinued.” On January 8, 2006 attorney Vassil Vassilev
filed a complaint with the Sofia Military Court against the order of 14 December. In the complaint he listed numerous violations that took place during the ·Chorata Case” and the investigation thereof. From the fact that the relatives were initially denied the right to appeal the closure of the criminal proceedings and familiarize themselves with the material submitted in the case, to the fact that the investigation had not been conducted by the proper competent agency, and that the criminal proceedings had been dismissed without there having been an objective, thorough and complete investigation, without most of the obligatory investigative procedural activities having been performed... In the complaint, besides insisting on further investigation and calling for the police officers to be held responsible for having intentionally committed murder, he also insisted that the hearing of the complaint and all testimony by the parties in the case take place in open court. The motivation of the Sofia District Military Prosecutor in denying the court - the final, independent tribunal - the possibility to determine whether the employees of the Interior Ministry had overstepped their authority, and whether they are guilty, are things that could be analyzed in another text. It is clearly possible to find loopholes in the law, under which officials of the Ministry charged with keeping public order could take a human life and not be held responsible for it. From the hundreds of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in police brutality cases, however, it is clear not only that the police must be held criminally liable, but also that the law must be much harsher towards them. Perhaps that is why a special parliamentary commission has been formed since the case of Angel Dimitrov’s death. However, it is also important to emphasize something else about the ·Chorata Case.” Angel Dimitrov’s relatives did something that nobody else has managed to do for at least 15 years: they forced state officials at the highest level to correct a position that had already been announced, and they forced the media to revise their version of the story, which they had based on the information presented by the Interior Ministry... Angel Dimitrov’s relatives called into question the inveterate, non-transparent approach of the Interior Ministry towards incidents of police brutality, in which it traditionally claims that officers have acted in self-defense and are not to be held liable. Angel Dimitrov’s relatives have shown the meaning of the term “civil society.” We hope that the court, too, will fulfill its role as a dispassionate and objective arbiter.