Witnesses point to alibi of two defendants in "Caliphate case"

At the trial of the case related to an attempt to create a Caliphate in the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic (KBR), four defence witnesses have stated that on the day of the attempt on Police Colonel Arthur Tembotov in December 2013, the defendants Oleg Miskhozhev and Akhmed Balkarov worked in another district of Nalchik. According to the defence, the witnesses have refuted the investigators' version that on that day Miskhozhev and Balkarov could plant a bomb to the victim.

On December 13, the advocate Vladimir Gladkov filed a motion demanding to question, as defence witnesses, Andrei Zandarov, Aslan Dokhov and an elderly couple of Grigory Tregubov and Alexandra Tregubova, who were to tell the court about the whereabouts of the defendants Miskhozhev and Balkarov on the day of the attempt on Tembotov.

All the witnesses have confirmed that they had never heard any calls for extremism from Miskhozhev and Balkarov, and had never seen any grenades, firearms or ammunition on them.

In the course of questioning other witnesses at previous court sessions, it often turned out that some of them had not even seen the moments of detection of objects during inspections and searches, said the advocate Olga Shibkikh.

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