The Supreme Court of Mordovia recently issued a verdict in the case of the contract killing of the chairman of the Association of Law Enforcement Officials under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Mordovia, retired police colonel Viktor Lavrov. The process, which lasted more than a year, received wide resonance. During the trial, more than 30 volumes of the criminal case were examined against 13 members of the Mordva criminal group, who organized an attack on an official car in August 1999, in which Lavrov and his driver were. The car was shot with a Kalashnikov assault rifle: the colonel was killed and the driver was seriously wounded. It took the court seven days to read the 826-page verdict. According to Judge Vasily Martyshkin, unprecedented pressure was exerted on the investigative authorities and witnesses in the case. So, in September last year, three days before appearing in court, witness Sergei Kalmykov was killed. A grenade with the pin pulled out was hung on the door of the apartment of one of the investigators, and only by luck did he survive. And during the reading of the verdict, open threats were made by the defendants to the members of the court. The court upheld the prosecution and sentenced 12 defendants to prison terms ranging from 8 to 25 years. The main accused, Oleg Konakov, who shot Lavrov, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
