The Horrors of Siberia.

Te Aroha News, Volume I, Issue 43, 29 March 1884, Page 4

The Horrors of Siberia.

The "Times" St. Petersburg correspondent says : — "The following account of the brutal behaviour of Siberian officials towards a simple exile appears in the latest number of the" Siberian Gazette, "furnished by M. Skurotoff, who writes from the spot : A certain doctor was detained as a criminal in the Tiukalinsk province of Tolbolsk, and forbidden to practise. On the 23rd of October he received an order that he was to be removed to another locality. Being very ill and completely bedridden, he at once got two doctors to certify that he could not leave in his then state of health. This testimony was utterly disregarded, and on the following day theassistant police«master, with a number of police and soldiers, entered the dwelling and ordered him to get up. He said he was too weak to rise. The assistant police-master said he would make him. He asked for the attendance of the Judicial Procureur, but was told that such a request was superfluous. His request to be taken to the hospital was treated with contempt, and on his observing that he should die on the road, the police official said it was all the same to him. He was thereupon carried out on the mattress, in his bare nightdress, and pitched into a cart standing ready horsed at the door. The bystanders were so moved by this unnecessary brutality that some loudly expressed their anger, and one man took off his fur coat and threvr it over the all but naked sick prisoner as he was being driven away. His young child, still at the breast, was thrown on one side like a piece of wood, and the mother's hands bound while her husband was being carried off. On arriving at his destination — for he survived the journey — he was found { to be dangerously ill with typhus fever,"