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Russian commandos sentenced in absentia for murders - Coffee Break - 06-15-2007 08:01 AM Russian commandos sentenced in absentia for murders Moscow - A Russian court on Thursday sentenced four commandos, three of them in absentia, to prison for the massacre of six Chechen civilians in a controversial case seen as a test of Russia's willingness to confront war crimes in Chechnya. Human rights activists welcomed the guilty verdicts and sentences of nine to 14 years handed down by a military court in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. However, the disappearance of three of the accused in April meant the legal marathon, which featured three trials, remained mired in controversy. A military judge sentenced in absentia Captain Eduard Ulman to 14 years, and two other servicemen to 11 and 12 years, Russian news agencies reported. The only one of the accused still attending the trial, Major Alexei Perelevsky, was sentenced to nine years and taken into custody immediately, RIA Novosti news agency said. Clothed in black shirt and trousers, Perelevsky was shown on Russian television shaking his head at the verdict. The other three, said by prosecutors to be on the run, are on a federal wanted list. They vanished in early April when the court was about to hear closing arguments. The elite commandos shot five unarmed Chechens execution-style, including a pregnant woman, near the mountain village of Dai in 2002 to cover up an earlier accidental killing of a civilian. The soldiers, serving in the army's top secret Main Intelligence Directorate, known in Russia as the GRU, said they were following orders. Two civilian juries found the men not guilty before the verdicts were overturned on technicalities and the case transferred to the military court in Rostov-on-Don. "I am glad that justice prevailed in this long battle between civil society and the military," Lyudmila Alexeyeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group told AFP. "The military will have to reflect on their responsibility when they receive orders now." Lev Ponamaryov, from the organisation For Human Rights, said the verdict was "very important at a time when summary justice is increasingly common in provinces around Chechnya, especially Dagestan." Russian and international human rights rights experts say federal forces and their Chechen militia allies committed mass war crimes, ranging from carpet bombing of civilian areas to torture, during two wars in the last 12 years. Only a handful of servicemen, mostly lower-ranking soldiers, have been put on trial. Prosecutors had demanded sentences of 18 to 23 years for Ulman's group, but said they were not disappointed with the court's decision. "The verdict was guilty, which is what we demanded," prosecutor Colonel Nikolai Titov said on NTV television. "I don't see a tragedy in the fact the sentences handed down by the court were somewhat lower than what we asked for." One of the relatives of the victims, Toka Tugurova, told Interfax: "We are satisfied with the fact that the verdicts were guilty. Of course, the sentences were minimal, but that's the choice of the court." A representative of the Chechen government installed after Russian forces subdued a more than decade-old independence movement, Ziyad Sabsabi, said that Chechens had "long awaited" the end to the trial. "We expected something more, to put it mildly, but the most important thing is that there were guilty verdicts," he said, Interfax reported. Agence France Presse |