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The international legal cooperation of investigative authorities in different countries in fighting crimes has proven efficient many times. Mutual assistance of competent bodies in different states in revealing all details of crimes is a guarantee of the principle of inevitability of punishment. One of striking examples of such efficient cooperation is joint work of the Russia’s Investigative Committee and competent bodies in Belgium.

Dyshni Amagov, a Russian national, stabbed to death a local resident at a night club in Belgium on 27 June 2007. He then fled the country and hid in the Chechen Republic. When Russian investigators received a legal assistance request from Belgium, they faced a number of problems. Namely, the father of the accused produced his son’s death certificate. Despite those difficulties, the investigators with the help from their Belgian colleagues managed to reveal that the death certificate was a fake, and Amagov had changed his surname to Amayev. In November 2015, a district court in Chechnya found Amayev guilty of the murder of a Belgian citizen committed in Belgium and sentenced him to 7 years in prison.

Pointing out constructive cooperation between the two agencies in solving the crime, Frederic Van Leeuw, the Belgian Federal Prosecutor, expressed deep gratitude to Chairman of the RF Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin and added that the injured party was convinced of triumph of justice.

It should be mentioned that the Russian investigative practice knows just few cases when Russian citizens were jailed for major crimes committed abroad because investigation of such cases is quite difficult as the capacities to carry out investigative operations abroad are limited. At the same time, in addition to Amagov, in the recent years the RF Investigative Committee has prosecuted Solovyov and Rakosiy for murders committed in the USA which became possible thanks to constructive and mutually beneficial cooperation with foreign competent bodies in the first place.

The general amount of mutual legal aid of the RF Investigative Committee reaches up to 1,800 requests a year, with about half of that number being requests from foreign countries. As of now, the RF Investigative Committee provides legal assistance to more than 110 states.