Odesa - The Odesa Prymorsky District Court has found Adam Osmayev, who was suspected of preparing a terror attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin, guilty on three counts defined by the Ukrainian Criminal Code.
However, the court said that the two years and nine months Osmayev had spent in prison were a sufficient punishment and released him in the courtroom, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent reports.
The prosecutor demanded a maximum sentence of five years for Osmayev after the terrorism charges had been dropped. The defense said that he had pleaded guilty on three counts, namely, illegal turnover of explosives, destruction of citizens’ property by negligence and crossing the Ukrainian border with fake documents and asked the court to limit his sentence to the time he had already served.
In addition, the defense team presented a statement by an aggrieved party who dropped the damage claims because she had received compensation.
The prosecutors excluded two terrorism-related counts from the bill of indictment on Oct. 31.
Osmayev’s lawyer Olha Chertok said the decision was based on an analysis of the appeal by the defense team and the defendant’s denial of the testimony he gave during the pretrial investigation. Osmayev said he had been made to testify under pressure.
Osmayev was detained in Odesa on Feb. 4, 2012, on suspicion of detonating an explosive device on Tiraspolska Street in Odesa on Jan. 4, 2012. The explosion killed 26-year-old Ruslan Madayev, a citizen of Russia, and seriously injured 28-year-old Ilya Pyanzin, a citizen of Kazakhstan, who was taken into custody and willingly cooperated with the investigators.
Russia filed a request for the extradition of Osmayev and Pyanzin in summer 2012 but the defense teams of both defendants challenged the extradition approval by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office in court. The court upheld the decision to extradite both suspects to Russia as lawful but the delay allowed Osmayev’s defense team to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The defense of Pyanzin failed to file a similar appeal on time and he was taken to Russia in late August 2012 and denied the testimony given in Ukraine. The Prosecutor General’s Office annulled the resolution extraditing Osmayev in late August 2014.
A criminal inquiry into Osmayev’s actions ended in fall 2013 and the Prosecutor General’s Office approved the bill of indictment on November 16 and referred his case to the Odesa Primorsky District Court.
