Demerchyan's defence demands to summon key prosecution witnesses to court

On August 1, a regular session was held on the case of Mardiros Demerchyan, a builder of Olympic facilities in Sochi, accused of false denunciation of policemen and stealing cable from the construction site.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that Mardiros Demerchyan worked in Sochi at construction of Olympic facilities and was detained on June 12, 2013, on charge of stealing building materials. According to investigators, at that construction site, an electric cable worth over 50,000 roubles was stolen.

The prosecution witnesses summoned to the session failed to appear. The prosecutor Mikhail Galkin offered to read out their testimonies.

The defence of Mardiros Demerchyan agreed to listen to testimonies of three witnesses.

"Their testimonies have no sense... and they state nothing. However, the defence insists on calling and questioning the workers from Kyrgyzstan Askar Ismailov and Asylbek Ryskulov, since no one had ever seen them," Alexander Boichenko, a builder’s advocate has explained the situation to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent, adding that these witnesses gave essential evidence against Demerchyan to investigators.

"Do they really exist, and why, if they saw everything, they hadn’t they reported to the police? I’d like to clarify these issues with these Kyrgyzstan citizens, as well as their legality of working at the Olympic construction," Mr Boichenko has noted.

The court has ruled to hear the testimonies of three witnesses given to investigators, and to summon again the above Kyrgyzstan citizens for the next session. At the same time, the judge said that he had information that these two witnesses do not live at their places of registration in Kyrgyzstan, but stay in Russia, but where exactly the court marshals could not find out yet.

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