* Suspects held in largest trial in post-Soviet history
* Accused of participating in big 2005 attack
By Alissa de Carbonnel
MOSCOW, April 25 (Reuters) - More than 25 defendants in post-Soviet Russia's biggest trial are on a hunger strike to protest alleged beatings, threats and poor conditions in their jail in the turbulent North Caucasus, lawyers said on Monday.
The defendants, who began their protest on April 19, are among 58 on trial for a 2005 attack on government and law enforcement facilities in the province of Kabardino-Balkaria that left more than 140 people dead.
The trial, Russia's biggest since the Stalinist 1930s, has been marred by allegations of torture and legal violations brought by lawyers and rights activists.
Rights groups say abuses by the authorities are fanning violence in the mostly Muslim North Caucasus, where the Kremlin is struggling to curb a growing Islamist insurgency.
Conditions at the jail where the defendants are being held in Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, worsened sharply after a new director took charge last month, prompting the hunger strike, Magomed Abubakarov, a lawyer for one of the defendants, told Reuters by telephone from the city.
Masked Interior Ministry troops given access to the prison have beated detainees, while prison guards confiscated television sets and refrigerators and restricted defendants' access to lawyers in recent weeks, said Valery Khatazhukov, a human rights activist who visited the prison.
ACCESS BLOCKED
Abubakarov said lawyers had been barred from taking cell phones into the courtroom after snapping photos there of bruises on their clients' bodies.
"It has become very difficult to visit clients in pre-trial detention. After cases of beatings and torture they block access to the detainees, sometimes for up to a week, so that no complaints are lodged," he said.
Abubakarov said prisoners had filed complaints saying they had been threatened with castration or rape. He said his client had been refused medical care for hepatitis and was "in a very bad state. His back is covered in sores."
The Federal Prison Service declined to comment on the complaints.
Asked last week whether he denied that detainees were beaten, Nalchik jail chief Vladimir Popov said: "No ... pretrial detention is not summer camp," according to the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Most of those killed in the day-long attack in Nalchik in October 2005 were alleged attackers. The violence has left scars in the province, and analysts say failure to address the root causes, and doubts over the trial, have increased tension.
Most violence in the North Caucasus, a strip of poor provnces along Russia's southern border, has taken place in Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan and Ingushetia. But bombings in Kabardino-Balkaria, further west, more than tripled last year to 41, according to data from the web portal Caucasian Knot.
(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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