ROSTOV-ON-DON, June 28 (AVN) - Colonel Yuri Budanov, former Siberian military district 106th guard tank regiment commander, accused of raping and killing a young Chechen woman of the village of Tangi-Chu, Urus-Martan district of Chechnya, might be amnestied in the near future, the Military News Agency learned on Wednesday.
According to the initial investigation story, Budanov overnight to March 27, drunk in the company of three contract soldiers arrived at Tangi-Chu on an infantry fighting vehicle. They burst into a house where a young woman with two small kids lived. Having blanketed the woman the soldiers put her into the IFV and transported to the location of the regiment, where she was placed in the commander's house.
According to the soldiers, Budanov summoned them two hours later. They saw the body of the naked girl in the house. Budanov ordered them to take the killed woman out of the regiment and bury her.
The criminal medical expertise did not prove the story of raping, Anatoly Mukhin, Budanov's lawyer, told the Military News Agency.
Budanov claimed he received a report the woman was a sniper in one of the illegal armed formations. In the course of the interrogation Bdanov carried out on his own she threatened him and then attacked and tried to rip away a chain off his neck. Being in the heat of passion, Budanov strangled her.
The investigation assigned a stationary psychiatric expertise to Budanov. If the story that the killing was in the heat of passion confirms, the accusation can be re-qualified. In that case the accusation will be changed and Budanov will be amnestied.