MOSCOW, July 31. /TASS/. Three sisters charged with the brutal murder of their father in northeastern Moscow have complained that their rights were violated during their detention, Secretary of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission Ivan Melnikov said on Tuesday.
The body of a 57-year-old man with multiple stab wounds to the neck and the chest was found late on July 27 in the hallway of a high-rise building. The next day his daughters aged 17, 18 and 19 were taken into custody on suspicion of committing the murder. During the interrogation, the girls pleaded guilty explaining that they despised their father "who had inflicted psychological torment on them for a long time," a spokeswoman for the Main Investigative Department in Moscow, Yulia Ivanova, said.
"The sisters claim that during their arrest the police officers did not explain to them their rights as stipulated in Article 51 of the Constitution, namely the right against self-incrimination, they were not allowed to make one phone call and the initial evidence at the police department was made without lawyers present," Melnikov stressed.
Two girls complained that they have stab wounds, one to the hand and one to the leg. They claim that their father had been beating them since they were 10 years old. "We have questions how this went unnoticed by school teachers and child protective services," Melnikov pointed out. The girls also said last year they went to school just seven times and were not allowed to attend their final exams.
Social workers had tried to visit the girls just several times but their father did not open the door and then no other attempts were made.
The commission plans to ask Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Anna Kuznetsova to check the work of the child protection services and the school’s authorities.
Another member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission Pavel Pyatnitsky told TASS citing several sources that the father had used violence against his children.
"One of the man’s neighbors wrote me a personal message on a social network page that he was a tyrant and both girls and the neighbors suffered from him, and he solved any disputes by force and threats," he said. One of the sources confirmed that violence was committed against at least one of the daughters.
The three sisters have been charged with premediated murder under Part 2 of Article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code and may face up to 20 years in prison. The punishment may be mitigated if it is proved that the man was killed in the heat of passion.
Media reports said the father had behaved tyrannically to his children and permitted his daughters to leave home only to go to school or to the store. The neighbors were afraid of the man saying he owned a gun.