Staff at HMP Wandsworth knew Aleksandras Maslennikovas barely spoke English. They used an interpreter exactly once in his entire year in their custody. In a report released this month, the prison’s watchdog says it has raised this exact failure before.
A 47-year-old Lithuanian national, Maslennikovas was remanded to Wandsworth in June 2022 on a European arrest warrant. He died in his cell on 17 July 2023. It took nearly three years for an inquest to conclude that he took his own life. No independent record of that inquest has been published, and the Ombudsman’s report is currently the only public account of the verdict.
The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman’s investigation found he died of ligature compression and buprenorphine toxicity. In plain terms, he took an overdose and hanged himself. Buprenorphine is a medicine given to help people come off heroin and other opiates, easing withdrawal without the same high. He had not been prescribed buprenorphine since October 2022, nine months earlier.
“We suspect that he obtained it illicitly from another prisoner who was prescribed it,” investigators concluded. Wandsworth has since started switching buprenorphine from tablet to injectable form specifically to stop prisoners trading it, an admission that the risk was already known.
Maslennikovas had no contact with his family throughout his time at Wandsworth, and his last contact with a friend was in February 2023. His prison record contains no key worker entries at all. Wandsworth suspended one-to-one key work supervision during the pandemic and had not restarted it for him by the time he died.
The 16-hour closure
An officer correctly recorded on Maslennikovas’s first night that he spoke little English. A nurse’s health screen later logged him as English-speaking anyway, and no interpreter was called. A GP relied on Google Translate. “This is not the first time that we have raised concerns about staff’s failure to use interpreting services for foreign national prisoners at Wandsworth,” the Ombudsman’s report states.
It is the same pattern we found with Waleed Ali, whose escort record warning no one at Wandsworth read before he died within six hours of arrival.
On 12 July 2023, Maslennikovas cut his arm four times, needing ten stitches. Staff opened an ACCT, the prison’s formal self-harm and suicide watch. They closed it around 16 hours later, on his word alone that he was safe. No healthcare staff and no interpreter were in the room.
At 8pm on 14 July, he burned paper in his cell and set off the fire alarm, telling an officer he wanted to move wing because he felt under threat. She said she would pass this to night staff. Nobody considered whether it meant his ACCT should be reopened.
In the early hours of 15 July, he damaged the furniture in his cell and cut himself doing it. A nurse attended but could not assess the wound because he was hostile, and wrongly recorded that he “remains on ACCT” rather than flagging that he was in the post-closure review period, the spell of extra monitoring that follows once a watch formally ends. That evening he and his cellmate smashed a pipe, flooding the cell, and he demanded to be moved to the segregation unit.
Staff moved him to a shared cell on B wing instead, a wing where searches between 10 and 18 July turned up improvised weapons, drugs and violence between prisoners. An officer held a brief review because of the move. No healthcare staff attended, and despite noting that Maslennikovas struggled to understand English, the officer did not use an interpreter. She decided his next scheduled ACCT review should stay as 20 July. He was found dead on 17 July, three days before that review was due.
What the prison promised
The report uncovered two separate gaps. The first: a clinician who gave Maslennikovas his final dose of opiate detox treatment in October 2022 should have added him to a follow-up review list. Nobody did, and he had no further contact with substance misuse services in the nine months before his death.
The second dates back further. In December 2022, staff found two litres of fermenting liquid in his cell, a sign of alcohol misuse behind bars. Nobody passed that finding on to healthcare staff or the substance misuse service, so nobody treating Maslennikovas ever learned about it.
Wandsworth and Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, which runs healthcare at the prison, accepted two fixes for these gaps. Oxleas promised a new nurse-led alcohol risk assessment by February 2025, the same month it promised to close the detox review gap. HMPPS separately promised an updated national drug strategy framework by June 2025. All three target dates had passed by the time the report reached the public this month, over a year (17 months) after it was signed off.
Maslennikovas died inside the same nine-month window as two other cases this paper has documented. Waleed Ali died in October 2022. Rajwinder Singh died in June 2023, a month before Maslennikovas. Three men, one prison, nine months. It is the pattern the Ombudsman’s annual report exposed. His case was already an investigation this paper flagged in February, when the Ombudsman opened his 27th case into a Wandsworth death. Usher’s report notes Maslennikovas was the prison’s fourteenth self-inflicted death in three years. Five more followed by the end of November 2024. The pattern has not stopped since.
The interpreter Maslennikovas needed was available. Wandsworth used one, once.
Since Maslennikovas’s death, the toll has kept growing. Thomas James, 84, Ahmed Said, 31, and Kamal Uddin, 49, died within eight days of each other in March 2026, a cluster this paper reported at the time. Victor Mullery, 68, died in May, after his release from Wandsworth. Martin Hunter, 70, died in the prison on 3 July, weeks before Maslennikovas’s own report was finally published. The Ombudsman has yet to publish findings on any of these five deaths.
If you are affected by anything in this article, Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Call free on 116 123, email jo@samaritans.org, or visit samaritans.org.
INQUEST provides specialist, independent and confidential support for families bereaved following a death in state detention. Visit inquest.org.uk or call 020 7263 1111.
The Wandsworth Prison Improvement Campaign works to improve conditions at the jail and supports prisoners on release through its Leavers Lounge programme. Visit wandsworthprisoncampaign.co.uk.
