A court in Moscow jailed the killer of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov for 20 years on Thursday and handed four accomplices in the high-profile murder harsh sentences ranging from 11 to 19 years.
Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister who became a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin, was shot dead late at night on February 27th, 2015, on a bridge near the Kremlin in a brazen political killing.
A military court in Moscow convicted five men, all of them from the Chechen republic in the Russian North Caucasus, of involvement in Nemtsov’s murder late last month. All five had pleaded innocent to the charges.
Reading out the sentences on Thursday, the judge ordered Zaur Dadayev, a former deputy commander of an elite Chechen battalion, to serve 20 years in a maximum security penal colony for shooting Nemtsov dead.
Four other men, including the brothers Anzor and Shagid Gubashev, Temerlan Eskerkhanov and Ramzan Bakhayev, were handed prison sentences of between 11 and 19 years for acting as accomplices in the crime.
The judge ordered each of the five convicted men to pay fines of 100,000 rubles (€1,462) on top of their prison sentences.
Kremlin critic
One of the young liberal politicians who sprang to prominence after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Nemtsov was once considered a possible successor by Boris Yeltsin, the first president of Russia. But after that job went to Putin he entered the opposition, emerging as one of the most articulate critics of Kremlin policies.
Russian prosecutors say Nemtsov's killers were offered money to murder the politician, but claim that investigators have not yet discovered who contracted the crime. Nemtsov's family and friends suspect a cover-up and have demanded that Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman president of Chechnya, is called in for questioning.
After the sentences were pronounced on Thursday, Vadim Prokhorov, a lawyer for Nemtsov's family, pledged to continue the fight to bring those who organized and ordered the politician's murder to justice. "Today's sentences show that all the threads lead at least to Grozny [the capital of Chechnya]," he told reporters at the court.
Signs of torture
Russian prosecutors had recommended that Dadayev should be jailed for life, but the judge opted for a lighter, 20-year sentence on Thursday after taking into account that the former law enforcer was the father of young children and had some “positive” characteristics.
Dadayev, who was arrested in Chechnya nine days after Nemtsov was shot dead at close range in Moscow, initially pleaded guilty to the murder, but soon retracted his confession, saying it had been given under duress. Russian human rights activists who visited Dadayev in prison at the time reported finding marks on his body suggesting he had been tortured.
After losing their case, defence lawyers said they were planning to appeal against the sentences in the European Court of Human Rights.
"The law enforcement agencies want to draw a line under the case, but it's still too soon for that," Anna Byurchiyeva, lawyer for Temerlan Eskerkhanov, told Interfax on Thursday.