Four men accused of carrying out Russia’s deadliest terrorist attack in a long time appeared in a Moscow court on Sunday evening bandaged and battered. One of them got here in together with his ear partially cut off. Another sat in an orange wheelchair, had a bulging left eye, an unbuttoned hospital gown and a catheter in his lap.
Many people around the world, including Russians, already knew what happened to them. Since Saturday, videos of men being tortured during interrogation have been widely circulated on social media in what analysts have described as apparent retaliation for the accused mastermind of last Friday’s concert hall attack that left a minimum of 139 people dead and 180 injured.
One of the most annoying videos showed the accused, identified as Saidakrami M. Rajabalizoda, having a part of his ear cut off and stuffed into his mouth. A photograph circulating online shows a battery connected to the genitals of one other man, Shamsidin Fariduni, during his arrest.
It was not immediately clear how the videos began circulating, but they were spread through nationalist, pro-war Telegram channels believed to be close to Russian security services.
Although state television didn’t show the bloodiest clips, the brutal treatment of the accused became clear. And the decision by Russian authorities to present it publicly in court, in a way they’ve almost never done before, was intended as an indication of revenge and a warning to would-be terrorists, analysts say.
In Russia’s recent history, videos of torture haven’t been shown on state television, said Olga Sadowska of the Committee Against Torture, a Russian human rights organization.
“There were two intentions” to distribute the videos, Ms. Sadovskaya said. “Firstly, to show people who might be planning another terrorist attack what could happen to them, and secondly, to show the public that there is revenge for everything that people suffered in this terrorist attack.”
She and other analysts said the blatant display of those tortured showed something else: the degree to which Russian society has grow to be militarized and tolerant of violence since the war in Ukraine began.
“It’s a sign of how far we’ve come in accepting new methods of warfare,” said Andrei Soldatov, an authority on Russian security services.
International research has shown that societies tolerate violence against people they perceive as the worst offenders, including terrorists, serial killers and perpetrators of violent crimes against children.
Nevertheless, Ms. Sadowska stated that movies broadcast on television are a brand new record for the Russian state.
“This shows that the state and the authorities are showing that violence is acceptable, that they are normalizing torture against a specific entity,” she said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov declined to comment on the torture allegations during a briefing with journalists on Monday. But former President Dmitry A. Medvedev, who now serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said: “Well done to those who caught them.”
“Should we kill them? We should. And we’ll do it,” he wrote on Telegram on Monday. “But what is more important is to kill everyone involved” in the attack. “Everyone: those who paid, those who sympathized, those who helped.”
Ivan Pavlov, a lawyer who defended difficult national security cases before he was forced to flee Russia, said torture has long been used in terrorism and murder cases, mostly out of sight. When news of torture leaks into prisons, he said, “it lets other people know that in the event you are accused of terrorism, special forces will torture you.” So it acts as prevention.”
Sunday’s court hearings were unusual because torture was so brazenly displayed, Mr. Pavlov said.
“They used to hide it from the public, but now they do not because the public is prepared for violence,” he said. “It is no longer something that is extremely unpleasant for the general public because of the war.”
Russia is no longer a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, but the Russian constitution prohibits torture. It is also part of the United Nations Convention against Torture.
Because torture is a crime both under international law and in many countries, defense lawyers would typically seek to have confessions extracted under torture thrown out because they are notoriously unreliable, said Scott Roehm, director of global policy and advocacy at the Minnesota-based agency Center for Victims of Torture operating around the world.
The black-and-white legal finding that torture is a crime, a fundamental aspect of international human rights law, came under pressure in the United States after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Roehm noted. Therefore, the military commissions dealing with the cases at Guantanamo Bay had to take into account that some of the evidence was contaminated by torture.
“Abusers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the various consequences of their actions,” Mr. Roehm said, especially after an attack like the one in Moscow. “I imagine that the mindset of the torturer is commonly a mix of a heavy dose of revenge and the completely false, ignorant assumption that torture can induce someone to ‘confess’ and that the confession will be used to convict that person.”
Extremist trials in Russia are generally over, as are most of Sunday’s hearings, so it’s unclear how much defense lawyers opposed the practice. Most Russian judges would probably ignore it anyway, Pavlov said, because they know in advance what is expected of them in terms of sentencing.
Indeed, the judge in the case of Muhammadsobir Z. Fayzov, 19, who at times seemed barely conscious, almost completely ignored the fact that the defendant was in a wheelchair, wearing an unbuttoned hospital gown, and in a plastic container there was urine from a catheter in his lap . According to a report by the independent Russian news agency Mediazona, the judge only admitted this once, when he ordered two doctors accompanying Mr. Fayzov to be removed from the courtroom along with the rest of the audience as he closed the hearing.
Pavlov noted that the blatant flaunting of abused suspects on Sunday was particularly egregious. “These are obviously sad circumstances,” he said, “but they made a circus out of the trial.”
Soldatov, the security services expert, said the torture and the official response to it were a signal to the military that gruesome violence was now acceptable and encouraged.
He said that by releasing videos of torture, authorities were “sending a message of intimidation to anyone who shouldn’t be on the side of the Kremlin, and so they are sending a really encouraging signal to the military and security services that you just are on the same side.”
Ruslan Shaveddinov, an activist and investigative journalist associated with the Anti-Corruption Fund of Alexei A. Navalny, an opposition activist who died last month in a Russian prison, called on Russians to condemn both terrorists and the torture used against them.
“It must be said: torture is not normal,” he said he tweeted on Sunday. “Torture as a phenomenon should not exist. The police and the state are torturing a terrorist today, they see approval for this method, and tomorrow they will torture an activist, a journalist, anyone else. They don’t know any other way.”
Aric Toler reporting contributed.
