Photo (from left to right): Aslan Dukayev and Bekkhan Abdurashidov.

Yesterday, on 2 December 2020, the Gudermes City Court of the Chechen Republic started a debate on a case of former Rosgvardiya officers Bekkhan Abdurashidov and Aslan Dukayev who are charged with illegal apprehension of Aleksey Kardashov from Dagestan. The State Prosecutor asked the court to sentence the defendants to two years of conditional term.

As we have previously reported, on 15 April 2019, Tsilya Yakubova from Khasavyurt town of the Republic of Dagestan applied to the Committee Against Torture for legal assistance. She reported that on 14 September 2017, her son Aleksey Kardashov brought her to the dentist on his car and she has never seen him since. On the same day, Yakubova applied to the Investigative Committee and reported her son missing.

On 21 September 2017, a criminal case was opened with this regard at the Khasavyurt Interdistrict Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee of the RF for the Republic of Dagestan under part 1 Article 126 of the Criminal Code of the RF (“kidnapping”). On 2 April 2018, criminal cases were initiated with regard to the fact of theft of money from Kardashov’s bank cards, as well as of his car. Later on, all the three criminal cases were joined in one procedure.

On 15 October 2018, based on Omarov’s evidence, investigator of the Khasavyurt Interdistrict Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee of the RF for the Republic of Dagestan initiated criminal proceedings with regard to Aleksey Kardashov’s murder. In November 2018 the case was transferred to the first department for major cases with the Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee of the RF for the Chechen Republic, due to the fact that Omarov gave testimony that the Chechen law-enforcement officers were involved in Kardashov’s kidnapping.

On 11 January 2019, the Chechen law-enforcement officers Kalogi Aziyev, Alikhan Yusupov, Aslan Dukayev and Bekkhan Abdurashidov were put on a wanted list with regard to Aleksey Kardashov’s murder.

However, after the criminal case was transferred to the Chechen investigators, the circumstances changed abruptly. On 15 February 2019, Omarov suddenly applied to the Department of the Interior for the Gudermes District himself with a confession of Kardashov’s murder. So from a witness Omarov turned into a defendant.

Despite the new evidence provided by Omarov, in March 2019, Dukayev and Abdurashidov were arrested on suspicion of Kardashov’s abduction. They were charged under item “a”, Part 2 of Article 126 of the Criminal Code of the RF (“abduction of a person performed by a group of persons”). Later on, they were charged under item “a” of Part 3, Article 286 of the Criminal Code of the RF (“abuse of office using violence”). Later on, the investigative authorities drew a line between the actions of Omarov and the actions of former Rosgvardiya officers Abdurashidov and Dukayev, having severed the criminal case against former law-enforcement officers.

On 29 November 2019, after the criminal case returned from the Prosecutor’s Office for the third time, the investigative authorities decided to qualify the actions of Rosgvardiya ex-officers in a different way in the framework of the criminal legislation. Abdurashidov and Dukayev were charged under Part 1 Article 286 of the Criminal Code of the RF (“abude of office without using violence”). According to a new theory of the investigative authorities, law-enforcement officers only performed illegal apprehension of Kardashov, having violated territorial and departmental jurisdiction, but they did not apply violence and did not intend to abduct Aleksey.

On 23 November 2020, Said-Magomed Omarov, on the evidence of whom the criminal case against Abdurashidov and Dukayev was based, was declared guilty of Aleksey Kardashov’s murder and of theft of his car. The court sentenced Omarov to nine years of jail time with serving a sentence in maximum security penal colony.

At the present time, Kalogi Aziyev and Alikhan Yusupov are still on the federal wanted list.

Yesterday, on 2 December, at the Gudermes City Court, Deputy Prosecutor of the Gudermes District Khalid Edelgereyev requested the sentence for Abdurashidov and Dukayev in the form of two years of imprisonment for each. At the same time, the Prosecutor asked the court to apply Article 73 of the Criminal Code of the RF (“conditional sentence”), i.e., that the sentence is conditional with two years of probation period.

“We insist that the case should be returned for additional investigation and examined with the full scope of evidence. Now we are reaping the fruits of the fact the Investigative Committee turned one criminal case into four without good reason: Omarov case, Abdurashidov and Dukayev case, Yusupov and Aziyev case, as well as the case with regard to unidentified person who stole the money from Kardashov’s bank card. Before sending the criminal case to court, the investigator played solitaire and distributed part of evidence in one criminal case so that in the case of Abdurashidov and Dukayev there would be no documents disproving the latest evidence of key witness Omarov, – head of the North Caucasus branch of the Committee Against Torture Dmitry Piskounov is convinced. – It is highly probable that this last evidence was obtained as a result of pressure put on Omarov and it is disproved by objective evidence: telephone connections billing, location of the telephone connection to the base stations, information from “Potok” traffic data base system”.