The former chief doctor of Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison was sentenced to seven years in jail for selling fraudulent medical releases that allowed inmates to continue treatment in civil hospitals, media reported Tuesday.
Alexander Kravchenko was accused of allowing the medical release of four prisoners “to reduce the number of prisoners,” according to the news radio station Business FM.
Kravchenko, who was initially detained in January 2022, denied the charges.
Moscow’s Preobrazhensky District Court found Kravchenko guilty of abuse of power and handed him a seven-year sentence in a prison colony according to the state-run Interfax news agency.
Kravchenko was stripped of his military rank of lieutenant colonel and banned from working in the healthcare system for two years after his release, Interfax reported.
Moscow’s prosecutor’s office claimed that Kravchenko had handed out “unjustified diagnoses of severe illnesses” that allowed the release of Matrosskaya Tishina’s prisoners.
Eva Merkacheva, member of President Vladimir Putin’s presidential human rights council, had singled out Kravchenko as “the best chief doctor at Matrosskaya Tishina” at the time of his arrest.
“We never had any issues with him at all,” Merkacheva told Interfax in January last year. “I believe this is some kind of monstrous mistake.”
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