MOSCOW. Nov 10 (Interfax) - Russia's nationalists are convinced that ex-Interior Troops officer Sergei Arakcheyev, sentenced to 15 years in jail for killing civilians in Chechnya, is innocent and will be freed soon.
Reports were circulated on Thursday claiming that Arakcheyev's defense lawyers have asked the Prosecutor General's Office to re-examine the criminal case. President Medvedev inquired about this issue while meeting with bloggers on Wednesday.
"Arakcheyev's prison confinement was a mistake. His sentence was politically motivated and the verdict was unlawful," the head of the Supervisory Council of the Russkie nationalistic movement, Alexander Belov, told Interfax on Thursday.
He said he attended the hearings of the Arakcheyev case and does not doubt his innocence.
"If Arakcheyev is freed, if they agree to free him, it will be a step of enormous force. I think they will do this ahead of the presidential elections," Belov said.
"I don't think he will be freed tomorrow, but I do hope that justice will triumph and he will be freed in the foreseeable future, in a few months," he said.
It emerged on June 15, 2011, that Arakcheyev had asked Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in a video to set things straight in his case.
"I did not kill, there is no one's blood on my conscience, which is most important. Although my alibi is apparent, I am prepared to undergo all polygraph tests and I am saying this openly," the ex-officer said, according to the video posted on the Internet.
"I've been asking myself one and the same question since I was jailed five years ago: if the state prosecutors did find me guilty, why are there so many frauds and so much rigging in my case?" Arakcheyev said.
Meanwhile, Memorial Russian human rights center head Oleg Orlov told Interfax in June that rights groups in Chechnya deem Arakcheyev's guilt proven.
"I personally am not familiar with details of the case and our defense lawyers were not involved in it. But claims that Arakcheyev is not guilty and that the proof provided was not convincing enough are familiar to me. I also know the opposite opinion, shared by Chechen rights campaigners who studied this case. They consider the evidence provided serious and weighty," Orlov said then.
Reports said earlier that former Interior Troops officers Arakcheyev and Yevgeny Khudyakov were sentenced to 15 and 17 years in jail on counts of killing three civilians in Chechnya in 2003. The defense lawyers appealed the verdict, but the Supreme Court upheld it in 2008.
Khudyakov did not turn up in court and he was sentenced in absentia. Arakcheyev was taken into custody in the courtroom and moved to a prison in Rostov-on-Don. He was subsequently transferred to a prison in the Ryazan region. Khudyakov was entered on a wanted list.
A reconnaissance group under Khudyakov and Arakcheyev's command stopped a car in January 2003, in which three residents of the village of Lakha-Varandy were traveling, according to investigators. Khudyakov ordered all of them to get out of the car and lie down, and he killed them, firing shots to the head. To conceal the killing, they pushed the car with the bodies onto the side of the road, poured gasoline on it and set it ablaze. The passports of the murdered civilians were destroyed.
Furthermore, at the officers' order, their soldiers stopped a car with passengers and Khudyakov searched the driver, seized the valuables he had on him and ordered him to take him to his base, where he questioned the driver and shot him in the leg three times, according to investigators.
The North Caucasus district military court acquitted the former officers in 2004 and in 2005, based on a jury's verdict.