Translated material
Day of protests
The prosecutor's office demanded that the verdicts in the cases of Bykov and Kholodov be overturned
The Moscow prosecutor's office yesterday protested the verdict against the former head of the Krasnoyarsk aluminum plant, Anatoly Bykov. Investigators accused him of organizing the murder of his former business partner Vilor Struganov, and the Meshchansky Court of Moscow on June 19 found Mr. Bykov completely guilty. However, they did not put the businessman in prison, but unexpectedly limited themselves to a suspended sentence of six and a half years in prison. And now the Moscow prosecutor’s office has filed a protest, believing that since Mr. Bykov was found guilty on all counts, he should serve his sentence not in freedom (which requires a suspended sentence), but in a colony. “The prosecutor's office respects the court verdict,” Moscow Prosecutor Mikhail Avdyukov said yesterday, but “at the same time, he believes that the court did not provide sufficient grounds for its decision.” The scandalous verdict against Mr. Bykov, by the way, outraged many State Duma deputies, who recently turned to Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov with a request to “organize a review of the validity of the sentence passed by the court.” However, the troubles for Mr. Bykov did not end there - yesterday a message came from Krasnoyarsk that the local prosecutor's office had completed the investigation and had transferred two more cases against him to court. According to one, Anatoly Bykov is accused of possessing weapons, on the other - of involvement in organizing another murder - Krasnoyarsk businessman Oleg Gubin, who was shot dead in the mid-90s.At the same time, representatives of the Prosecutor General’s Office, as promised, filed a protest against the verdict of the Moscow District Military Court in the case of the murder of Moskovsky Komsomolets correspondent Dmitry Kholodov. All the defendants - former airborne intelligence chief Pavel Popovskikh and five of his former colleagues - were completely acquitted on Wednesday. As indicated in the appeal of the Prosecutor General's Office, the verdict should be canceled “due to the obvious discrepancy between the court’s conclusions and the objective circumstances of the case.”