Translated material
Careless arsonists
General Gamov was recognized as an accidental victim of an intimidation campaign
Last Friday, the jury of the Sakhalin Regional Court announced its verdict in the case of the murder of the head of the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk territorial department and the deputy head of the Pacific Regional Directorate (TORU) of the Federal Border Service of Russia, Major General Vitaly Gamov. All three defendants - Alexey Anikin, Alexey Britov and Sergey Malyutin, who, according to investigators, threw Molotov cocktails at the general's apartment in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, were found guilty. However, the jury assessed their actions in a completely different way than the prosecutor's office insisted. The prosecution believed that the defendants were guilty of murder of a person in connection with his official activities and attempted murder. The jury found that in this case there was only “arson resulting in death.” Thus, the death of General Gamow, in fact, was recognized as the result of the careless actions of the accused, for which they could most likely face no more than five years in prison, although the prosecutor’s office insisted on life imprisonment for them.According to the investigation, on the night of May 21, 2002, a group of unknown people threw three 1.5-liter Molotov cocktails at the windows of the general’s apartment, located on the first floor. As a result of the fire, Vitaly Gamov received burns to 90% of the surface of his body and died a week later in a clinic in the Japanese city of Sapporo. More than 80% of his wife’s skin was damaged by fire, but doctors managed to save her after long-term treatment, first in Japan and then in Moscow. The general’s son, who was 13 years old at the time and who was also in the apartment, was not injured as a result of the emergency, since his parents immediately took him outside and returned to put out the fire and save property.
The investigation immediately began to develop the version that General Gamow became a victim of one of the coastal criminal groups involved in poaching fish and seafood, against which Sakhalin border guards were actively acting. Detectives began tracking the suspects in June 2002, but they were detained only in the fall of 2005. Anikin, Britov and Malyutin (all of them born in 1979), according to investigators, at one time studied together at the Kaliningrad Maritime College, and later were part of one of the criminal groups. Immediately after the assassination attempt on General Gamow, as it turned out, they left Sakhalin. Anikin, at the request of the Russian authorities, was detained by the authorities of Transnistria, where he lived with relatives using a fake passport as a citizen of Ukraine. After Sakhalin investigators interrogated him, Britov and Malyutin were detained, who, as it turned out, had been living quietly all this time in their hometown of Chernyakhovsk (Kaliningrad region).
The trial (at the insistence of the accused - with the participation of a jury) began in the Sakhalin Regional Court in early October of this year. The widow of General Gamov, Larisa, who came from Sochi, where she currently lives with her son, also took part in it, supporting the prosecution. The prosecutor's office, considering the defendants' guilt fully proven, demanded that they be recognized as murderers and sentenced to capital punishment - life imprisonment.
The accused themselves and their lawyers, without denying their involvement in the attack on General Gamow’s apartment, meanwhile said that they did not even think of killing General Gamow. According to the defense, the mastermind of the crime, whose name is not being named in the interests of the ongoing investigation, asked Alexei Anikin only to scare the intractable general. At first it was proposed to burn down Vitaly Gamov’s dacha or personal car, but since the border guard did not have anything like that, Anikin and two of his comrades decided to set the apartment on fire. In addition, the prosecutor's office failed to substantively link the commercial activities of the mysterious customer with the fight of General Gamow against Far Eastern poachers. As a result, the jury accepted the defendants' version.
Larisa Gamova was dissatisfied with this verdict, noting that it actually “washed” the criminals, since the recognition of only one fact of arson automatically made the death of General Gamow the result of the negligence of the accused. “We will fight,” said the general’s widow. As far as we know, the prosecutor’s office also disagrees with the jury’s decision and will now most likely try to appeal the verdict.
It will be issued in the coming days. But it is already obvious that, taking into account the jury’s verdict, the defendants do not face serious punishment. Most likely, their actions will be classified as intentional destruction or damage to property by arson, which through negligence resulted in the death of a person and other grave consequences (Article 167 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), for which no more than five years of imprisonment are provided.
Currently, Anikin, Britov and Malyutin are awaiting a court verdict in the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk pre-trial detention center. It is worth noting that the criminal case against the customer of this crime has been separated into separate proceedings and is still ongoing. He is currently on the international wanted list. The version voiced back in 2003 by the then Minister of Internal Affairs Boris Gryzlov that the mastermind of the attack on General Gamov was the crime boss Vasily Naumov, known by the nickname Yakut, who was killed in South Korean Busan, is not currently being considered by the prosecutor's office.