| Yuri Shutov was sentenced to life imprisonment The St. Petersburg court on Friday finished announcing the verdict in the case of deputy of the city legislative assembly (LA), ex-assistant to the mayor and ex-candidate for governor Yuri Shutov. At the same time, the expectations of many observers who had been closely following this process since 1999 that Shutov’s case would fall apart did not come true. In St. Petersburg, many were sure that this truly demonized politician, who had already partly turned into a character in urban folklore, “just for the sake of it” would receive a seven-year prison sentence - the same amount of time he had already spent in a pre-trial detention cell. It turned out completely different. Shutov and his four accomplices - “mentors of young fighters” Airat Gimranov and Sergei Denisov and “miner shooters” Alexander Gagutkin and Evgeniy Nikolaev - were found guilty of almost all charges and, by a court decision, will have to spend the rest of their lives behind bars in special regime colonies. However, the verdict has not yet entered into legal force, and lawyers are determined to appeal it.
Deputy Shutov himself greeted the verdict with muffled groans - according to his defense, he is seriously ill, practically cannot move and has difficulty reacting to what is happening. During the trial, he sat in a wheelchair and the doctors, keeping an eye on him, periodically gave him medication. During the 4.5 years of the trial, the defendant was taken by ambulance to the hospital many times with signs of a hypertensive crisis.
The second “ring” around Shutov and his accomplices consisted of dozens of bailiffs and members of the Typhoon special forces corrections department, who blocked all entrances and exits to the club of the legendary Kresty detention center, where, for security reasons, a visiting meeting of the St. Petersburg City Court was held.
Personally, Yuri Shutov, who to this day remains a deputy of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, was found guilty of crimes under a whole bunch of articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - organizing and leading a gang, organizing five murders, two attempted murders, kidnapping, robbery, as well as in fraud using official position.
For a long time, Yuri Shutov bore the informal title of the notorious whistleblower and brawler of St. Petersburg. Having entered the inner circle of Mayor Anatoly Sobchak in the early 1990s as his adviser, he very soon fell out with the mayor and began harassing him - until the end of the disgraced politician’s days. Many still remember his book “Heart of a Dog.” Then Mr. Shutov, on his own initiative, was engaged in “checking the results of privatization,” while furiously accusing Smolny of all mortal sins. The peak of his whistleblowing activity occurred in 1997-1998, when a series of high-profile contract killings took place in St. Petersburg, securing the city the title of criminal capital.
After Governor Vladimir Yakovlev took Sobchak’s chair in Smolny in 1996, Shutov again became friends with the city authorities. So much so that in the elections to the legislative assembly in 1998 he was on the list of candidates supported by the city administration, as opposed to Yabloko. But, as the investigation found (and the court agreed with this), it was in 1997-1998 that Shutov, with Ayrat Gimranov and Sergei Denisov, created a gang consisting of three “teams” of professional killers. Conspiracy, preparation and responsibility of the killers were organized according to all the rules of military art. The killers trained in shooting and mining at the training ground of the Pskov Airborne Division, changed nicknames, passwords and call signs several times a year, and communicated with each other only using a secret specially developed code.
However, all these precautions did not save the gang from arrest just four months after the most notorious crime, which, as the court recognized, was committed by Shutov’s henchmen. They installed a radio-controlled explosive device in the entrance of the house where the former head of the St. Petersburg tax inspectorate and an influential public figure of the city, Dmitry Filippov, a close friend of the then Chairman of the State Duma Gennady Seleznev, lived. Mr. Filippov conducted extensive business activities, heading, in particular, the boards of directors of the Menatep Bank - St. Petersburg and the Tobolsk Petrochemical Plant. When Filippov entered the mined entrance late at night, the infernal machine went off just above his head. The businessman died a few days later without regaining consciousness in the ward of the military medical academy.
The court agreed with the investigators' arguments that Shutov and his teams organized the murders of a number of other businessmen and liquidated them, and also prepared to blow up the car of Russian State Duma deputy Vyacheslav Shevchenko. They also approached the last case according to all the rules of military art - they dug a hole on the road leading to Shevchenko’s dacha and planted a remote-controlled landmine in it. Shevchenko miraculously escaped death. True, four years after the failed attempt, completely different killers finally got to him, when Shevchenko was vacationing in Cyprus.
Throughout the years that the trial lasted, Shutov’s numerous friends and supporters waged a vigorous campaign in his defense. And the defendant himself managed to be re-elected to the legislative assembly in 2002. And a year later, while at Kresty, he even tried to get involved in the campaign for the election of governor of St. Petersburg. However, collecting signatures in the pre-trial detention center did not bring him a sufficient number of supporters, and Shutov was not included in the list of candidates. Dmitry ANDREEV, St. Petersburg |
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