MOSCOW – The Russian Supreme Court began hearing appeals from the five men convicted of murdering opposition politician Boris Nemtsov on Oct. 10, an Interfax correspondent reported.
At the beginning of the hearing, the court dismissed the request of the new lawyer for principal defendant Zaur Dadayev, to be given time to study materials in the proceeding. Dadayev is being represented by lawyer Rosa Magomedova, who represented another defendant, Temirlan Eskerkhanov, at the stage of the preliminary inquiry.
“Considering that the lawyer has been given a reasonable period of time for studying materials in the proceeding and the fact that Dadayev has two more lawyers, the court believes there is no breach of the convict’s rights. Hence, the hearing will continue,” the judge said.
The aggrieved party told the court they would be able to attend the session until 3 p.m. Moscow time, after which they would go to the airport and fly to Strasbourg for a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
The convicts are participating in the hearing via Skype. They are in a good mood, joking and laughing, which has caused objections first from a detention facility officer, and then from their own lawyers.
“Behave. And say nothing, we can hear everything you say,” Magomedova told the convicts.
Nonetheless, they kept on joking and laughing.
The defendants’ lawyers demanded that the sentence passed by the military court be repealed and a new proceeding be held from the stage of jury selection. They said that numerous procedural violations occurred during the trial, due to which the verdict should be repealed.
The lawyers alleged that evidence was falsified, and the court breached the principle of equality and an adversarial trial.
On June 29, the jury found five defendants guilty of murdering Nemtsov and said they did not deserve lenience. The Moscow District Military Court took the verdict into account on July 13 and passed sentences ranging from 11 to 20 years in a maximum-security penitentiary and a fine of 100,000 rubles for each convict.
The maximum punishment was imposed on the perpetrator of the crime, former Sever battalion deputy commander Zaur Dadayev.
The Gubashev brothers, Anzor and Shadid, as well as Temirlan Eskerkhanov and Khamzat Bakhayev, were found guilty of making preparations for the murder.
The court established that the convicts, as well as Beslan Shavanov [killed in the course of detention] accepted an offer from Ruslan Mukhudinov and several unknown persons to kill Nemtsov for a fee of at least 15 million rubles in late September 2014.
The Russian Investigative Committee continues the criminal inquiry against Mukhudinov, whom the detectives suspect of being the mastermind of the crime, and his accomplices.
Nemtsov was killed on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in direct proximity to the Kremlin on Feb. 27, 2015.
