Prosecutor, sit down!

Colleagues avenged their adherence to principles: Yevgeny Chekalin sentenced to one and a half years in prison

On December 3, the Syktyvkar City Court sentenced Grigory Chekalin, former deputy prosecutor of the city of Ukhta, to one and a half years in prison in a colony-settlement. The prosecutor's office charged him under part 2 of article 307 (knowingly false ...

On December 3, the Syktyvkar City Court sentenced Grigory Chekalin, former deputy prosecutor of the city of Ukhta, to one and a half years in prison in a colony-settlement.

The prosecutor's office charged him under part 2 of article 307 (knowingly false testimony), and the state prosecutor demanded 4 years in prison for his former colleague.

Recall that Grigory Chekalin in 2009 posted on YouTube a video with an appeal to the president, in which he claimed that the evidence in the high-profile case of arson of a shopping center in Ukhta, where 25 people died, was falsified, and innocent people were sentenced to life. (“Novaya” wrote extensively about this investigation and came to the same conclusion.)

Mikhail Evseev, a former employee of the operational-investigative unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Komi Republic, recorded the same video message - he said that he personally took part in the forgery of evidence and described in detail how and with whom.

Immediately after the Internet premiere and press conference, the hunt began for Chekalin and Evseev. The former opera was even forced to hide, but in the end he was arrested and sentenced to a year in a colony-settlement for "disclosing state secrets."

A criminal case was also initiated against Chekalin, which dragged on for several months. The bottom line was that the former deputy prosecutor testified during the trial on the arson of the shopping center, in which he claimed that the real perpetrators were not found, and random people were in the dock. And he gave such good reasons for this that the first court acquitted the defendants and issued a private ruling against the prosecutor general, demanding to deal with the perpetrators of the obscene investigation.

When, on the second attempt, the Komi Supreme Court nevertheless convicted the petty thieves Pulyalin and Korostelev, Chekalin began to seek a review of the sentence. In addition, the former prosecutor has repeatedly stated that the alleged customers of the arson, the businessmen Makhmudovs, who are still under investigation, are also not related to the case, but are “fastened” to the charges because they refused to pay kickbacks to local security forces.

The prosecutor's office considered all these official testimonies to be deliberately false, despite the fact that during the trial, most of what Grigory Chekalin said was also confirmed by the ex-head of the republican UFSB, which conducted an investigation into the falsification of the materials of the criminal case on arson. Chekalin's lawyer, Grigory Burakov, said that his client's sentence was "weak, vague and vague, which is unlikely to stand in a higher court." However, in any case, everything that happened can be interpreted as the revenge of the prosecutor's office and the police on their former colleague, who did not want to play by the accepted rules.