Gay
Journalist Tortured Into Confession
365Gay.com,
November 3, 2003
By
365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
Tashkent—A
gay journalist and human rights advocate says he was tortured by prison guards
in Uzbeckistant into confessing to charges of sodomy and called the case
against him a crude fabrication designed to silence him and other critics of
the Uzbeck regime.
Ruslan
Sharipov was allowed to speak to reporters from the west for the first time
Monday. Sharipov was sentenced to four years in prison in September after an
August trial that human rights advocates called a sham.
Sharipov,
who is openly gay, was found guilty of having homosexual sex—illegal in
Uzbekistan under laws dating back to Soviet times—and also of having sex
with minors.
The
trial ended abruptly after Sharipov without warning dismissed his lawyer and
changed his plea to guilty.
Today,
he said that his jailers had tortured him and repeated claims he made in a
letter last summer to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in which said that
police forced him to write a suicide note and threatened to kill him if he
continued to fight the charges.
Sharipov
is being kept in a cramped cell at the Tavaksay prison, 70 kilometers
northeast of Tashkent.
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