| Officers who killed Chechen civilians are being tried again in Rostov The authorities are keeping their promise not to hush up the crimes committed by federal forces against civilians in Chechnya during the period of “restoration of constitutional order” in the rebellious region. Yesterday, a trial similar to the high-profile case of Colonel Budanov began in the North Caucasus District Military Court. This time in the dock are internal troops lieutenants Evgeniy Khudyakov and Sergei Arakcheev. They are accused of shooting four Chechen civilians, three of whom died.
The Kremlin took the difficult step of securing a guilty verdict against Colonel Yuri Budanov, who strangled 17-year-old Chechen Elsa Kungaeva. Society was not at all unanimous in supporting the authorities in this - on the contrary, many to this day consider Budanov’s sentence a “betrayal” of the army abandoned to fight in Chechnya. But although Vladimir Putin or his direct subordinates never officially commented on the Budanov case, they made it quite clear that not punishing the colonel would be a disgrace for the army. And now, judging by the “schedule” of the work of the same North Caucasus District Military Court, such criminal cases are clearly ceasing to be something supernatural and are turning into the usual routine of justice. Which, without a doubt, is much more advantageous for the authority of the authorities than an endless and detailed discussion of only one “exemplary” trial. And in the next year or two, apparently, in the military court in Rostov-on-Don many more “exploits” of the military in Chechnya, unknown to the general public, will be announced, the investigation of which has not yet been completed.
Yuri Budanov, after legal proceedings that lasted almost 20 months, was given ten years in a maximum security colony. Budanov's lawyers, dissatisfied with the delay in the process and the close attention to him from the Prosecutor General's Office, stated many times that in fact in Chechnya Russian officers committed much more terrible crimes than their client. And that, they say, the hype around the Budanov case is “unjustifiably great.”
Of course, Yuri Budanov was the first Russian officer to be tried for crimes against civilians in Chechnya, but in a sense, the defenders of the convicted colonel were still right. When, a few months after Budanov’s sentencing, hearings began in the same courtroom on the criminal case of four GRU special forces who shot the director of a local school, the head teacher and a forester in the Shatoi region of Chechnya, there were much fewer journalists at the trial than at Budanov’s. And only a few media outlets were accredited to yesterday’s hearing on the case of Senior Lieutenant Khudyakov and Lieutenant Arakcheev.
Meanwhile, Khudyakov and Arakcheev are accused of shooting four Chechen civilians at once. According to the prosecution, in January last year, a reconnaissance group under the command of these two contract officers carried out a special operation in the Oktyabrsky district of Grozny. The soldiers blocked the road with their armored personnel carrier and stopped a GAZ truck driven by local resident Shamil Yunusov. They searched him, took away his valuables and forcibly put him in an armored personnel carrier.
Later, the reconnaissance group stopped a KamAZ truck with three residents of the village of Lakha-Varanda. The detainees were ordered to get out of the car and lie on the ground, after which Khudyakov, according to investigators, shot each of them in the head. Then, to hide the evidence, the special forces pushed the truck with the corpses to the side of the road, doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. The passports of those killed were also destroyed. Later, already at the military unit, during interrogation, officers shot Shamil Yunusov in the leg three times.
Evgeniy Khudyakov was charged under points “a”, “g”, “h”, “l” 105-2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (murder of two or more persons, committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy, associated with robbery and motivated by national, racial hatred or hostility), 162-2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (robbery), 167 (deliberate destruction or damage to property), 286-3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (abuse of official authority). Sergei Arakcheev is charged with the same “set” of articles of the Criminal Code, with the exception of intentional destruction of property.
The case of Khudyakov-Arakcheev, at the request of the defendants, is being considered with the participation of jurors. Yesterday, the first two witnesses were questioned at the trial. The court hearing started late and lasted less than two hours. Relatives of the murdered, as well as numerous witnesses, arrive in Rostov from various parts of Russia, and judge Maxim Toporkov waited until the last minute for the participants in the trial to be summoned to court. As Vladimir Golovanov, assistant to the chairman of the North Caucasus Military Court, told a Vremya Novostei newspaper correspondent, 18 more prosecution witnesses have been called to today's hearing. Igor BURAKOV, Rostov-on-Don |
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