The court announced the verdict in the case of a broken window in the Moscow office of United Russia

The Golovinsky District Court of Moscow announced the verdict to Azat Miftakhov, Elena Gorban and Andrey Eikin, defendants in the case of a broken window in the United Russia office in Khovrin. This was reported by lawyer Svetlana Sidorkina, who is defending Miftakhov.

The court found the young people guilty under the article of hooliganism committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy (Part 2 of Article 213 of the Criminal Code) motivated by political hatred, and imposed the following punishment:

• Azat Miftakhov - six years in a general regime colony;
• Elena Gorban - four years probation with a probationary period of four years;
• Andrey Eikin - two years probation with a probationary period of three years.

The prosecutor at the meeting on December 23, 2020 asked Miftakhova for six years in a general regime colony, Gorban - four years suspended with a probationary period of five years, Eikina - two years suspended with a probationary period of three years. The announcement of the verdict was originally scheduled for January 11, but was postponed without explanation. Eight people were subsequently detained at the court. The next day it became known that some letters were not handed over to Miftakhov in the pre-trial detention center.

According to investigators, on January 30, 2018, Azat Miftakhov, Andrey Eikin, Elena Gorban and Alexey Kobaidze broke a window in the United Russia office and threw a smoke bomb there. Proof of Miftakhov's involvement in the incident with the window was the testimony of a secret witness who claimed that he recognized the anarchist by his “expressive eyebrows.” Kobaidze left Russia in October 2019. In the fall of 2020, it turned out that a classified witness under the pseudonym Andrei Petrov had died. At the hearing, the court called the hammer and fireworks weapons.

On December 25, 2020, the defendants in the case gave their last word, the FreeAzat telegram channel reported. Those who came to support them were detained at the courthouse. Elena Gorban in her speech recalled the inconsistency of the prosecution, the political bias of the case and numerous violations. Gorban's lawyer Nikita Taranishchenko explained in detail why the actions of the defendants cannot be qualified as hooliganism by prior conspiracy. Azat Miftakhov said that the criminal case against him was the revenge of the security forces for participating in opposition rallies. Miftakhov's lawyer Svetlana Sidorkina demonstrated in the debate the unconvincing testimony of the prosecution, procedural errors in the investigation and emphasized that her client, a talented mathematician, must be acquitted .

On the eve of the debate, an open letter appeared in defense of Azat Miftakhov, which was signed by more than two thousand people. The petition for his release has gained about 90 thousand supporters. In addition, representatives of the Russian Academy of Sciences spoke out about the inadmissibility of persecuting Miftakhov. On January 4, 2021, members of the International Mathematical Community addressed the organizers of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which is to be held in St. Petersburg in 2022. “Participation in the congress during the arbitrary detention of our colleague Azat Miftakhov will be a serious dilemma for us and for the entire mathematical community. We kindly ask you to take an active position in this case and contact government authorities for the release of Azat,” the scientists’ letter says.

On the day the verdict was announced, at least eight people were detained near the court.

• Azat Miftakhov was detained on February 1, 2019 in the case of manufacturing explosives (Part 1 of Article 223.1 of the Criminal Code) during searches of left-wing activists. He was taken to the Balashikha police department, where, according to him and the testimony of POC member Valery Borshchev, he was tortured with a screwdriver. On February 4, the court was supposed to choose a preventive measure for the anarchist in the case, but the hearing was postponed for 72 hours - the investigation did not provide data proving the need for his arrest, the prosecutor argued. The case under this article was eventually dropped.
• On February 7, 2019, Miftakhov was released from the police department, but was immediately detained again - this time in the case of a broken window in the United Russia office. The investigation into this case was suspended in September 2018 and resumed in February 2019. The court imposed a preventive measure on Miftakhov - detention. In October 2020, he was interrogated in connection with the explosives case in Balashikha.
• In December 2020, Azat Miftakhov, while in a pre-trial detention center, published a preprint of the scientific article “Continuity module for a sequence of martingales.” In June 2019, the journal “Reports of the Academy of Sciences” published an article by Azat Miftakhov, co-authored with Vladimir Bogachev and Stanislav Shaposhnikov, “Differential properties of semigroups and estimates of distances between stationary diffusion distributions.”