What made his conduct even worse was that by the late spring of 2009, we were getting bits and pieces of news that Sergei was being tortured in detention. Sergei’s jailers put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds and kept the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat and no windowpanes in the winter in Moscow, where he nearly froze to death. They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor, where the sewage would bubble up. His hostage-takers seemed to have two objectives. One was to compel him to drop his testimony against
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