In the summer of 2022, in colony No. 3 in the village of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, where the politician Alexei Navalny recently died, a Tajik prisoner, 43-year-old Bakhrambek Sharifov, was tortured to death. He was rolled up in several mattresses, wrapped in tape, and died from lack of air. Later, the colony administration reported this death as a suicide of the prisoner.
Convicted Sharifov was sentenced to 25 years in prison for organizing a group to transport drugs from Tajikistan. Colony staff attempted to destroy the instruments of torture and reported the death as a suicide by hanging. However, an autopsy disproved the suicide version, and ultimately, five colony employees were charged with abuse of power.
The publication “Kholod,” which conducted its investigation that revealed the death of prisoner Sharifov, believes that many have died in this colony in 2016 and 2017, but relatives of the deceased are not informed about the causes and circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths. Families who cannot reach IK-3 within a day to retrieve the body of the deceased bury them in a special section of the cemetery in Kharp without a surname, under the prisoner’s number.