Russia, April 27: Sixty Russian officials should be banned from the United States over the torture and death in prison of a lawyer who exposed a $230 million (£149 million) fraud by corrupt policemen, a powerful US government body has urged Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State.
Senator Benjamin Cardin, the chairman of the Commission on Security and Co-operation in Europe, sent Mrs Clinton a list of security service agents, police, prosecutors, judges, tax officials and prison wardens who he said were implicated in the killing of Sergei Magnitsky.
The request threatens to cause a row between the Kremlin and the Obama Administration.
The list includes Viktor Grin, Russia’s Deputy General Prosecutor Viktor Grin, Aleksei Anichin, the Interior Ministry’s chief investigator Alexei Anichin, and 11 senior judges.
Mr Magnitsky, 37, died in November in Matrosskaya Tishina prison, Moscow, where he was held in pre-trial detention for almost a year for an alleged tax crime. He was refused medical treatment despite serious illnesses and denied access to his family.
Mr Magnitsky, a lawyer for the US firm Firestone Duncan, represented Hermitage Capital, a London-based hedge fund, in a battle with Kremlin officials allegedly involved in the theft of companies belonging to Hermitage and HSBC.
He was arrested on the orders of a group of Interior Ministry officers whom he had accused of fraudulently reclaiming $230 million in state taxes paid by Hermitage.
He complained that officers repeatedly abused him to try to force him to withdraw his testimony. Prosecutors said that he died of a heart attack but the family was denied an independent post mortem examination.
Senator Cardin asked Mrs Clinton in a letter to blacklist the 60 officials and their families, saying that they were involved in “significant corruption” and responsible “for the torture and death in prison of … Sergei Magnitsky”.
The commission is a US Government agency set up in 1976 to oversee compliance with the Helsinki Accords on human rights.
It comprises nine Senators and nine members of the House of Representatives as well as officials from the Departments of State, Defence and Commerce.
—Agencies