Ihor Indylo, a student who should have turned 20 the next day died in police custody in May. He had committed no offence, went voluntarily to the police station, apparently after an altercation with a police officer living in the same student hostel. He died from head injuries and haemorrhaging.  The police claimed that Ihor fell in a state of inebriation and that no police officers are implicated in his death. After a report on the TV 1 + 1 Channel, the story became high-profile, with the Prosecutor General and Kyiv Prosecutor promising to get to the bottom of it, and then the President meeting Ihor’s parents last week.

Unfortunately, there would seem little evidence of real will to prosecute those guilty of a young man’s death.  It is reported at www.golosua.com that Ihor’s medical records are being used to justify the police version of events. The agency quotes its own sources within the Ministry of Internal Affairs [MIA] as saying that investigators have questioned doctors in several hospitals of the Chernihiv region and taken Ihor’s medical records away. The management of the Kyiv Prosecutor’s Office have already been told that Ihor had been injured several times in childhood and that his parents had supposedly concealed this from the law enforcement bodies.

The examples range from a skull injury requiring hospitalization when he was 7, and allegations that on 18 November 2008 he took part in a fight in the Kyiv Hydropark and also received a head injury.

“If you put these cases together, the result of the second forensic medical examination promised for September, is predictable. They’ll claim that the student had had head injuries before, and that it’s not surprising that he died after falling on a wooden fall. And they’ll terminate the case.”

Ihor’s mother, Ludmila Indylo, stresses that there were no long-term consequences of her son’s childhood injuries. She notes, too, that in October 2009 he went through all the medical tests for conscription and was found to be health and able to do military service. She is convinced that her son was beaten in the Shevchenkivsky Police Station, and then the doctors did not save him. “Both the police and the doctors are to blame.”