Nearly 200 people are thought to have died in police custody in Russia last year, according to a new investigative website calling itself “Russian Ebola”.

Founded by journalist Maria Berezina, the site monitors deaths in police stations, pre-trial detention facilities and related institutions, and publishes the information online.

Berezina, who previously worked at the Journalism Investigations Agency in St Petersburg, said she first noticed the reports of frequent deaths while working for the prominent Russian opposition journalist Oleg Kashin.



She decided to request data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and said she had been shocked by the statistics.

Each month, the official figures showed that between nine and 29 people died at police stations across the country, with very few cases ever investigated further.



Berezina informed Kashin of her discovery, who wrote a column about the figures.

“If every day the news brings sudden death at a police station, then we’re really talking about some strange epidemic that needs to have clearly identified reasons, needs to be localised and combatted effectively,” Kashin wrote.

“I’m afraid of this epidemic and I want everyone to be afraid, because it is terrifying, and it must be stopped,” he added.

If every day brings news of ​sudden death at a police station, then we’re talking about a strange epidemic Oleg Kashin

Berezina decided to make the data more visible, and launched Russian Ebola in March last year. The name is a reference to the deadly virus which has killed thousands across west Africa.

“It’s not difficult to find these reports,” Berezina said in an interview with the Russian Spektr website. “I just search in Yandex.news, I type in a search query like ‘Police. Died’. This doesn’t take a lot of time.”

Besides daily updates and summary statistics each month, the site also publishes opinion columns by human rights lawyers and advocates discussing police abuse and detainee rights.

Though the site seeks to raise awareness, Berezina has said Russian Ebola won’t leak information about alleged police mistreatment but will rely solely on official and publicly available statistics.

Women wait to be escorted for work detail at a prison outside the city of Orel, central Russia, 2011. Photograph: Yuri Tutov/AP

Chilling data

Figures from Berezina’s 2015 report paint a disturbing picture of treatment in state detention.

Breaking down the numbers by gender, geography and type of death, the report found that a vast majority of those who lost their lives were male – 183 men died in 2015, compared with 14 women.

The most popular cause of death in 2015, according to the interior ministry data, was a “sudden deterioration in health conditions” (104 people), usually described by “unknown circumstances” or “a stopping of the heart.”

Sixty-two people reportedly took their own lives, five died from epilepsy, three from tuberculosis, two from alcohol-induced delirium, and one was poisoned.

Ten others were said to have died of trauma they allegedly received before arriving at the detention facility, five burned to death and one was said to have been murdered by fellow detainees.

Of the 197, just four were reportedly killed by police officers.

The report also touches on one of the more publicised cases of 2015 – that of Vladimir Tskaev, who was detained in the city of Vladikavkaz on suspicion of attacking a special forces police officer but was pronounced dead at a hospital the day after his detention.



Police claimed the man beat his own head against the floor, but Tskaev’s relatives rejected the explanation.

When allegations of misconduct emerged in November last year, the men suspected of beating Tskaev were reportedly arrested along with the head of the local criminal investigations department, while the North Ossetia interior minister lost his job.

In a recent interview with Daily Dot, Berezina said that an official response from Russian law enforcement was unlikely. She said she had been questioned about the website by the state Centre for Combating Extremism, who had not taken claims against the police seriously.

She said the Russian Ebola website was created “in order for people [to] think for themselves”.

A version of this article first appeared on Global Voices Online