Translated material
Gang neighbors
The trial of the alleged accomplices of the submariner Pumane has begun
Yesterday, the Moscow City Court began considering the merits of the criminal case of a criminal group, which allegedly included former submarine officer Alexander Pumane . The trial, at the insistence of the majority of the accused, takes place with the participation of a jury. There are seven people in the dock - Valentin Bar-Biryukov, Marcel Garifullin, Yuri Zyablov, Sergei Khomutov, Alexander Ivanov, Andrei Ivanov and Igor Uldanov. According to the prosecution, they were part of a criminal group that, since the end of 1992, had been operating in Russia, carrying out contract killings. The prosecutor's office believes that the defendants were the perpetrators of five murders and another failed attempted murder. Moreover, according to the investigation, three of them were personally committed by the submariner Pumane, who was beaten to death by policemen in the capital’s 83rd department of the Presnensky Department of Internal Affairs in September 2004.The first court hearing began with a speech by the state prosecutor, who outlined the plot of the case to the jury. The investigation materials say that the defendants at different times (from 1993 to 2000) became part of a criminal group engaged in hired murders. “They did it for money, receiving from $400 to $20,000 per murder,” prosecutor Yulia Safina told the jury. Most of the victims of the killers were employees of commercial companies associated with the oil business.
According to investigators, on January 13, 1994, Salavat Gainanov, director of production at the Novo-Ufa Oil Refinery, was murdered in Ufa. The criminals attacked him in the entrance of his house, first stabbed him five times, and when the businessman ran out into the street, they finished him off with a control shot to the head. For the murder of Gainanov, as investigators believe, the criminals received $800 each. According to the prosecutor's office, the killers committed another crime in Ufa in April 2001, killing the chief accountant of Bashneftekhimtorg CJSC Valery Speransky. The remaining victims of the killers lived in Moscow. On December 22, 2002, also at the entrance of a residential building, an attack was made on Oleg Bulatov, an employee of the German company Ronex, which was involved in oil transportation. He died from multiple gunshot wounds in the ambulance. In January 2000, members of this gang shot up the car of the head of SUN Company CJSC, Mikhail Orlov. He miraculously survived - the criminals' weapons jammed. In 2001, the defendants, according to the prosecution, killed the former vice-president of the First O.V.K. bank. Lyudmila Krasnoger.
The prosecutor’s speech in this episode was emotional: “The criminals prepared very carefully for the murder. They bought a garage, dug a hole in it and prepared cement. They figured out that every day Ms. Krasnoger catches a privateer on Prospekt Mira. On November 12, she got into a tinted Moskvich, in which the woman was shot. The criminals then buried her body in the garage and covered it with concrete.” A year later, Vasily Khitarishvili, chairman of the board of VMS-Oktan CJSC, was killed with six gunshot wounds to the head.
As follows from the plot of the accusation, the killer of Speransky, Khitarishvili and Bulatov was personally Alexander Pumane, who was also part of a gang of killers. In September 2004, he was detained in the center of the capital. The police found explosives in the car driven by Pumane. This happened immediately after the explosion at the Rizhskaya metro station and the tragedy in Beslan. Pumane was mistaken for an accomplice of Chechen terrorists, and more than 150 employees of various special services came to interrogate him at the 83rd department. After a “conversation” with the police, Pumane, with numerous beatings, was taken to the Sklifosovsky Institute, where he died. The Moscow Prosecutor's Office opened a criminal case into the death of the detainee. The main suspect in the beating, former head of the Organized Crime Control Department of the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Directorate Vyacheslav Dushenko, is still wanted. At first, Pumane was declared an accomplice of terrorists. Investigators then revealed that he was a killer.
In total, according to investigators, the gang of killers included more than 20 people, the majority were residents of the city of Kingisepp, Leningrad Region. “The organizers and leaders of the gang, Finagin, Sofiev, and Ulyantsev, are hiding from law enforcement agencies and have been put on the federal wanted list,” the state prosecutor said. Who ordered all these murders remains “behind the scenes” of the prosecutor’s speech. After the meeting, Ms. Safina explained that the investigation into the criminal case in this part, as well as against other members of the gang, is still ongoing, and is being conducted by the Prosecutor General’s Office.
“Yes, they lived in the same small town and, naturally, knew each other. But this does not mean that they were part of a criminal group. There are not professional killers in the dock!” - said Valentin Bar-Biryukov's lawyer Boris Kozhemyakin in his speech. As follows from the speeches of the defense (in total, ten lawyers represent the interests of the seven defendants in the case), only Alexander Ivanov admits his guilt. The rest of the accused only partially admitted guilt or completely denied it.
Having decided on the procedure for examining the evidence, the court decided to give the parties time to organize the materials and set the next hearing for December 4.