Dmytro Lubinets briefed the media on the Spanish prisoner’s situation on Tuesday, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s polskieradio24.pl website reported.
The commissioner said, as quoted by polskieradio24.pl, that, according to a former cellmate, Mariano García was being tortured by “employees of the Russian special services” at a detention centre in the Crimean city of Simferopol.
García’s former co-prisoner told the media that the Spanish volunteer was being “brutally treated by prison guards,” had “bruises from hits on his legs,” had “lost some of his teeth,” and his body was "covered with bruises and scars," the Ukrainska Pravda website reported.
Lubinets said that García had not been allowed to see a lawyer, while the Spanish consul had not been notified of the 75-year-old’s detention.
The Ukrainian commissioner for human rights urged Russia “to immediately release” García and all Ukrainian civilians who, in line with the Geneva Convention, “cannot be held imprisoned on trumped-up charges in detention facilities” in Russia and in parts of Ukraine that are currently outside of the Kyiv government’s control, polskieradio24.pl reported.
Spanish volunteer imprisoned by Russia
Mariano García Calatayud, from the southeastern Spanish city of Valencia, was illegally detained by Russian troops in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson on March 19, 2022, and subsequently imprisoned in the Russian-occupied Crimea peninsula, Spanish officials confirmed last week.
The 75-year-old had been working in Ukraine since 2014, as a volunteer with a humanitarian aid agency, polskieradio24.pl reported.
Russia has only now confirmed that García is being held in Crimea, which represents the first official information of the volunteer’s whereabouts since his detention in Kherson over a year ago, Spanish diplomats said.
In a letter to Spain’s authorities, the Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Black Sea Fleet confirmed that the Security Service “detained Mariano García Calatayud and has been holding him in a detention facility,” according to the Euromaidan Press website.
Russian officials added that García had been detained due to being regarded as “a foreign agent” who had taken “hostile action against the Russian Federation” during the so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, which is the official Russian term for the war in Ukraine, polskieradio24.pl reported.
Tuesday is day 426 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: polskieradio24.pl, Ukrainska Pravda, Euromaidan Press
