Deputy head of Vradiivka district police department detained, says regional prosecutor's office
Deputy Head of the police department of Vradiivka district of Mykolaiv region is suspected of covering up the crimes committed on the territory of the district, Interfax-Ukraine learned at the regional prosecutor's office.
The ministry said that the criminal proceedings opened under Part 2 of Article 365 (abuse of power) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.
The police officer was arrested on Thursday morning.
The press service of the Prosecutor's Office said that four premeditated murders were committed in Vradiivka district in 2011-2013, three of them in 2011 and one in 2012. Among them is an unsolved murder of a 15-year-old girl.
However, locals say that this case is not the first unresolved crime in the district. Crimes were concealed or not investigated properly in the past. The local police did not investigate them objectively, and beat out the testimony of random people to improve the crime detection rate.
On June 26, three men pulled a 29-year-old woman into a car in the village of Vradiivka, took her to the forest near the village of Syrove, where they beat her up and raped her. The victim was hospitalized with open fractures of the skull, cut wounds to the head and face, multiple bruises and hematomas. She has had two surgeries, and her condition is regarded as serious.
The rape victim told the investigator that she was beaten and raped by two police officers - Lt. Dmytro Polischuk and Lt. Yevhen Dryzhak. A local taxi driver, Mykhailo Rabinenko, participated in the beating.
Polischuk and Rabinenko were detained on June 30. Dryzhaka, according to law enforcers, has an alibi - he supposedly was on duty at the police department at the time of the crime.
The fact that the second policeman was at large triggered protests by local residents who demanded his immediate arrest. On July 1, they were storming the district police department demanding the police officers involved be prosecuted.
On July 2, Dryzhak was detained. On July 3, the court ruled to place him under two-month arrest as a pre-trial restriction measure.
