Lawyers for the defendants in the case on bomb blasts that hit Dnipropetrovsk in April 2012 are again planning to insist that the case be considered by a jury.
“This article, under which Sukachov and Fedoriak [Viktor Sukachov and Vitaliy Fedoriak, defendants in the case on terrorist attacks in Dnipropetrovsk] were convicted, maximally envisages life imprisonment. Therefore, in this situation, I think that we will again raise the question of a jury trial, being guided by the provisions of the new Criminal Procedure Code,” Vitaliy Pohosian, the lawyer for defendant Dmytro Reva, said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday.
Another lawyer for Reva, Oksana Tomchuk, in turn, said that her client had been illegally detained.
“There’s not a single piece of evidence… There are no witnesses, no materials of examinations, and no facts. There are only answers from the pre-investigation department, which were given by the task force as evidence of Reva’s involvement in the April 27 bombings,” she said.
In addition, Tomchuk said that on November 22, the Shevchenkivsky District Court of Kyiv is to consider her appeal against the First National TV Channel. The lawyer said that she would insist on the untruthfulness of a film about “Dnipropetrovsk terrorists,” which was aired by the channel and in which “the facts are not just twisted, they simply don’t reflect reality.”
Tomchuk also said that she had filed a lawsuit at the Pechersky District Court of Kyiv against the Prosecutor General’s Office regarding its inactivity. She said that the issue concerned falsified evidence of Reva’s alleged involvement in organizing terrorist attacks.
“This is a call made from Reva’s phone by a [police] officer, and a further report that Reva tried to warn Sukachov that the searches were conducted and give him an opportunity to avoid being brought to account. This, in our opinion, is a falsification that formed the basis of charges brought against him,” the lawyer said, adding that the prosecutor’s office did not respond to a respective statement submitted by lawyers.
Earlier, the press center of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported that 228 examinations had been conducted as part of this case, 59 searches had been carried out, with over 300 witnesses and over 1,500 people questioned.
On April 27, 2012, four explosions occurred in a one-hour span in Dnipropetrovsk, injuring 31 people, including 10 teenagers, 26 victims were hospitalized. All the explosive devices were planted in concrete trash containers.
SBU investigators are probing the criminal case opened by prosecutors on terror charges.
On May 31, senior officials in the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General’s Office stated that two suspects had been arrested for allegedly demanding $4.5 million, otherwise they threatened to continue the explosions. It emerged on June 1 that four people were arrested. All of them have been remanded in custody by the court while the investigation is ongoing.
It was found later that one of them, Viktor Sukachov, is a senior political science professor at the National University of Dnipropetrovsk, and the second one, Vitaliy Fedoriak, is an assistant professor of political science.
