10:03, 17 April 2015

CaT condemns non-admission of advocate to Zaur Dadaev

The fact that advocate Evgeny Gubin is refused to visit Zaur Dadaev, accused of the murder of Boris Nemtsov, violates the criminal procedure law and questioned the evidentiary basis of the case. This was stated by members of the "Committee against Torture" (CaT).

Boris Nemtsov was shot and killed in Moscow on February 27. Investigators treat Zaur Dadaev as a direct perpetrator of the murder of politician Boris Nemtsov committed on February 27 in Moscow. Like four other defendants in the case, Zaur Dadaev pleads not guilty.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on March 10, Zaur Dadaev complained to the Public Oversight Commission (POC) about torture by power agents. On April 1, while the court was considering the appeal against the arrest, Zaur Dadaev retracted his initial confession and claimed that he gave it to investigators under pressure.

On April 13, Evgeny Gubin, the third advocate of Zaur Dadaev, hired by the CaT, filed a complaint against the investigating authorities for the fact that he could not visit his client for several weeks.

When commenting on the situation, Igor Kalyapin, the CaT's Chairman, has emphasized that the fact of non-admission of advocate Evgeny Gubin to Zaur Dadaev violates the criminal procedure law and the Constitution of the Russian Federation. Besides, according to Igor Kalyapin, the violation "plants a bomb under the evidentiary basis and it will then explode in any way," the official website of the CaT reported on April 15.

"When refusing to investigate complaints about torture and preventing the access of advocate, the investigators simply deprive themselves of every opportunity to refute the Zaur Dadaev's arguments, in case if they do not correspond to reality. Besides, the investigators subject all the evidentiary basis of the case to reasonable doubts," Igor Kalyapin has noted.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.