OSCE says no unjustified force was used against Andrei Ivantoc during his release

The Head of the OSCE Mission to Moldova, Ambassador Louis O'Neill, says that Andrei Ivantoc was not subjected to any unjustified force during his liberation from the separatist penitentiary. “There is no evidence that the political prisoner Andrei Ivantoc was somehow subjected to unjustified actions during his release on June 3”, Ambassador Louis O’Neil told a press conference on Monday, June 4. According to O'Neill, four times during his release “Ivantoc had to be caught and constrained because of his very strange behaviour”. According to the cited source, the cases which required use of force were “when Ivantoc attacked a cameraman, when he refused to leave the prison and get into the car to be transported to the border checkpoint, when he ran away from the checkpoint back to Tiraspol and when he refused to get into the car to be driven to Chisinau.” The OSCE observers say that in all the cases only the minimum force necessary was applied so as to constrain Ivantoc, who was “emotionally instable, unpredictable and sometimes even violent”. In contrast, the release of Todor Petrov-Popa “took place without any incidents”. O'Neill said that the release procedure of Ivantoc and of Petrov-Popa was “a good example of cooperation between the Moldovan and Transnistrian authorities”. At the same time, according to numerous witnesses, in the morning of the liberation day, Ivantoc was subjected to violence by the Transnistrian law enforcement bodies when jumped out of the car and started running back towards Transnistria, protesting against this illegal order and against this surrender procedure officiated according to a mutual agreement between the authorities from Chisinau and Tiraspol. Later, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Moldova published a press release mentioning that at arrival in Chisinau, Ivantoc could not stand the pain and called for help the Emergency Medicine National Centre, which diagnosed “brain concussion, facial, head and other soft tissue injuries, and multiple bruises”. The Committee requested that impartial and independent investigations are instituted concerning this case, and that the guilty persons are held answerable. HCHRM also demands that the victim receive fair and equitable compensation.