JUSTIFICED BY AUTOMATIC MACHINE

COURT YES CASE

Last Friday, after five hours of exhausting deliberation, a dozen St. Petersburg jurors delivered their verdict in the case of Vyacheslav Lelyavin and Pavel Stekhnovskiy, accused of complicity in the murder of Galina Starovoitova. According to the results...

Last Friday, after five hours of exhausting deliberation, a dozen St. Petersburg jurors delivered their verdict in the case of Vyacheslav Lelyavin and Pavel Stekhnovskiy, accused of complicity in the murder of Galina Starovoitova.

At the end of the five-month trial, the jury had to answer sixteen questions. Has the fact of a crime been proven - the creation of an organized criminal group in the summer of 1998, whose task was to eliminate State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova in order to stop her political activities? Was there a fact of acquisition of weapons for the subsequent murder of Starovoitova, did Pavel Stekhnovsky acquire them, and, accordingly, is he guilty of complicity in the murder? Has Vyacheslav Lelyavin's participation in this criminal group, his active assistance in spying on Starovoitova and delivering killers to the scene, been proven, is he guilty of this?

One of the defendants, Vyacheslav Lelyavin, was unanimously found guilty of complicity in the murder of Galina Starovoitova.

But with another accused - Pavel Stekhnovsky - there was embarrassment. The fact that Stekhnovsky acquired the Agran-2000 assault rifle in the summer of 1998 was considered proven by the jury. As well as the fact that in the same summer the same machine gun, Agran-2000, was purchased to kill Starovoitova. But the fact that it was the same weapon, the jury did not believe. They were not convinced by the arguments of the prosecution, the position of Stekhnovsky's lawyers, who claimed that these were two different machine guns, seemed more reasoned.

As a result, the jury acquitted Pavel Stekhnovsky, extradited to the Russian authorities last year by Belgium, of involvement in the murder of Galina Starovoitova. Recognizing him guilty only of illegal acquisition of firearms.

The jury found (seven votes to five) that the prosecution succeeded in proving the presence of a criminal group. But only one out of a dozen assessors believed that the murder was intended to stop the political biography of Galina Starovoitova. The rest considered this point unproven.

By the way, it was the political motive of the crime that was previously enshrined in the decision of the city court of St. Petersburg (and later confirmed by the Supreme Court) when sentencing the organizer of the murder, Yuri Kolchin, and one of the killers, Vitaly Akishin (sentenced to 20 and 23.5 years, respectively).

So, the role of the jury in the current trial is over. The court will have to hold a new debate - about the terms of punishment for the defendants. They will be held on September 27, after which the court will seal the jury's verdict with its verdict.