Translated material
Settlement of intercessors
Another follower of policeman-whistleblower Dymovsky convicted
The city court of Syktyvkar (Komi Republic) on Friday sentenced former deputy prosecutor of Ukhta Grigory Chekalin to one and a half years in a penal colony, finding him guilty of perjury (Article 307-2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Last November, he became famous as one of the first followers of Novorossiysk police major Alexei Dymovsky, who initiated the practice of video messages via the Internet to the country's leadership regarding corruption in the law enforcement system. Moreover, Mr. Chekalin then complained not “in general,” but about a specific criminal case - about the arson of the Passage shopping center in Ukhta in 2005, which resulted in the death of 25 people. He participated in this investigation and in his address to the president of the country said that the materials of the case were falsified and innocent people were convicted of arson.But in the end, the investigation, and now the court, decided that it was Mr. Chekalin himself who was involved in the falsification. It is noteworthy that two weeks ago, former employee of the Komi Ministry of Internal Affairs Vadim Evseev was also convicted, who also stated that he had falsified the case of arson of the Ukhta “Passage”.
A video message from the former deputy prosecutor of Ukhta appeared on the Internet on November 12 last year, the day after Mikhail Evseev made a similar message. The ex-policeman spoke about the “lawlessness” in the republican prosecutor’s office and the police and paid special attention to the case of the Passage arson.
A shopping center in Ukhta burned down on July 11, 2005, killing 25 people. Experts came to the conclusion that the Passage was set on fire deliberately, and soon the suspects were detained - 19-year-old local residents Korostelev and Pulyalin. According to the investigation, they acted on the orders of the entrepreneurs of the Makhmudov brothers - Fakhrutdin, Asret and Magomed. The first two were soon arrested, and Magomed was put on the wanted list. Last summer, Korostelev and Pulyalin were sentenced to life imprisonment.
They themselves did not admit guilt, and Evseev, who participated in the investigation of this case, came to their defense. According to him, completely different people ordered and committed the arson, who thus wanted to destroy evidence in their store in Passage, fearing a search in the case of fraud. Moreover, according to Mr. Evseev, he personally came to the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation when an appeal against the verdict of Korostelev and Pulyalin was being considered, but the court rejected the request to question him.
Grigory Chekalin also stated that in the case of arson in Ukhta, innocent people were convicted, and the materials against them were falsified, and back in 2007, when he was the deputy prosecutor of the city, he gave official testimony on this matter. But listen to Messrs. The authorities did not accept Evseev and Chekalin, but, on the contrary, insisted on their dismissal.
“I know that a criminal case will now be opened against me for allegedly giving false testimony in the process of arson of a shopping center,” Mr. Chekalin said a year ago, and he was not mistaken. In December 2009, the Komi prosecutor's office conducted an investigation that did not confirm the facts stated by Mr. Chekalin, after which a case of perjury appeared. On February 1, he was detained in Moscow, taken to Syktyvkar and, by court decision, released on bail. According to investigators, speaking with a video message, Mr. Chekalin acted in the interests of the alleged masterminds of the arson, the Makhmudov brothers.
He himself claimed that they were trying to imprison the Makhmudovs for refusing to share their business with local security officials, but the Syktyvkar City Court believed the investigation. Recently, Mikhail Evseev was also sentenced to a year and three months in prison. He was found guilty of disclosing state secrets. In addition, another case was opened against Evseev - about an attack on civilians in Chechnya, where he was on a business trip in 2004. This investigation has not yet been completed.
It is noteworthy that almost none of the followers of Major Dymovsky, who, like him, decided to openly talk about abuses and “lawlessness” in their units, escaped claims from the leadership. Thus, Mr. Dymovsky himself was first called insane and even suspected of having connections with foreign intelligence services, and then a fraud case was opened against him (it was later closed). Former employees of the capital’s traffic police Vadim Smirnov and employee of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate of the Sverdlovsk region Tatyana Domracheva, after video messages to the leadership of the country, were “suddenly” found to have a lot of “serious disciplinary violations”, and the latter was accused of slander. A former employee of the same Sverdlovsk Central Internal Affairs Directorate, Igor Konygin, was reminded that he “has already been convicted of abuse.” Ex-employee of the Sochi Military Prosecutor's Office Alexander Popkov was involved in a case of unauthorized leaving his place of duty, and an internal investigation began against Togliatti district police officer Alexei Mumolin.