When German Galdetsky, 19, saw Moscow subway police drag away his friend Olga who later emerged tearfully complaining of attempted rape, he embarked on a personal crusade that his family says nearly cost him his life.
The student, who vowed to expose an alleged police rape ring, is partly paralyzed and cannot speak after he was shot in the head on March 25 during a scuffle with two unknown men in a wasteland near a Moscow railway station.
"She was trembling and crying and told me that they had threatened her, told her that if she didn't give herself to them, they would arrest her and not let her go. If she told anyone, they would find and kill her," he said in an interview with the Novaya Gazeta newspaper shortly before the assault.
Galdetsky, who studied at the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, believed he had stumbled on a phenomenon shocking even for Russians used to brutal and corrupt behavior by police in the lawless post-Soviet era.
The incident involving Olga, late at night on Feb. 8 in central Moscow's Pushkinskaya metro station, led him to search for similar victims by putting notices on the Internet and trawling through prosecution and police offices in his lonely bid to see justice done.
He tried to take photographs with his mobile phone of the police officers who detained her, but said they forced him to delete them all. They claimed Olga was a prostitute and let her go only after he called their superiors.
After six weeks of investigation, Galdetsky had persuaded four other young women to file complaints of sexual abuse by police in several subway stations in downtown Moscow.
Police were targeting girls who were dressed simply and appeared to be from out of town, without the city residence permit required under Moscow's draconian Soviet-era registration system.
They would check passports, take them away to a police precinct inside the subway station, and after keeping them until the last train had left at 1am, threaten to arrest them unless they agreed to have sex, according to Galdetsky.
The dogged university student even managed to meet the head of the Moscow police's internal security department, responsible for looking into crimes by police.
Prosecutors, however, refused to press charges, citing lack of evidence.
"In all cases, it was decided not to pursue criminal charges -- either there was no crime committed or the girls withdrew their statements themselves," the chief spokeswoman for the Moscow prosecutor's office, Svetlana Petrenka, said.
But evidence of sexual abuse by police officers exists. Just 10 days before Galdetsky was shot, in southeast Moscow a Ukrainian woman was reportedly gang-raped in a police station seven hours after being detained during a routine document check.
"They took me into a room, two police officers came in and threatening me with violence, took turns in raping me," she said in an anonymous statement sent to the police and prosecutor's office.
The assault on Galdetsky has provoked a major public scandal amid accusations that he had been targeted by the police officers he was investigating.
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev took the inquiry under his personal authority and ordered the Russian police's internal security department and the national organized crime squad and criminal police to investigate their Moscow colleagues.
Closed-circuit TV showed Galdetsky talking to two men in Moscow's Yaroslavsky railway station. According to police, he was shot nearby at close range with his own pistol -- a rubber-bullet gun -- after a dispute.
His father, physicist Anatoly Galdetsky, believes the police were behind the attack on his son, noting that the assailants only took his mobile phone and notebook, leaving all his money and an expensive watch.
"It's logical to suppose that police officers who were caught up in German's investigations decided that if they beat him up he would be frightened and give up. When he took a pistol out during the scuffle one of them grabbed it and shot him," he told the Kolokol.ru human rights Web site.
Kirill Mazurin, chief Moscow police spokesman, dismissed this possibility, describing Galdetsky as a self-appointed vigilante who could have landed himself in the situation.
"He was a moral crusader, but that is the police's job. If a citizen sees a disturbance he should go to professionals, police officers," he said.
But amid widespread bribe extorting by badly paid police officers, and beatings and deaths in police custody and reports of torture to extract confessions, 75 percent of Russians do not trust law enforcement agencies, according to opinion polls.
"It's frightening to think that girls are at risk from those who according to the law should be protecting them. It's even more frightening that police chiefs are shielding the guilty," Galdetsky said as he waged his ill-fated campaign.
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