News

Last week there were received a number of letters thanking personally the Chairman of the Russia’s Investigative Committee and investigators of the Krasnodar Territory, Belgorod and Saratov Regions Investigations Directorates.

In her letter a woman from the Belgorod Region notes work of Regional Investigations Directorates which investigated a criminal case over the death of her son – Aleksey Burdyga.

A mass conflict took place on 1 August 2010, around 6 p.m., at the bank of the Nezhegol river near Peschanaya Street in the village of Tavolzhanka of Shebekinsky district. The conflict involved more than 30 people.

The clash of the holidaymakers at the river bank started with a generation conflict. Parents of Igor Potokin, a teacher at the police university had a row with some young people. Soon the policeman appeared and parents told him about the row in details. The policeman and his friends decided to deal with the offenders. During the fight Aleksey Burdyga, protecting himself, grabbed an axe and warned not to come near him, but did not attack anyone. When the policeman’s father came up to him, Aleksey lowered his “weapon”, hugged the old man and apologized. Then Aleksey was knocked down and the policeman kicked the falling man on his head and then kicked him once more when he was already defenseless.

Potoking inflicted on Burdygin a craniocerebral injury, which is considered a grave injury to health which can be fatal.

During the primary investigating operations there were several people suspected of beating the victim, each of which inflicted an injury to a different part of the victim’s body. To find the person responsible for the injury which then entailed the victim’s death and the actual circumstances of the conflict, investigators had to carry out a large number of investigating operations and expert examinations, to reconstruct the picture of the conflict in details.

The suspects of injuring Burdyga and more than 50 witnesses were repeatedly interrogated. Investigators carried out 15 checks of testimonies on the spot in presence of the witnesses involved in the conflict, 15 identifications, a lot of forensic examinations, including 10 medical forensic, 3 psychiatric, 2 commission medical-forensic expert examinations of the body, one of them with exhumation. According to the experts’ conclusions the victim died of edema of lungs and brain which were complications after craniocerebral trauma.

Thanks to the investigators who had managed to find cause-effect relation between the policeman’s blow and Burdygin’s death, the criminal case was forwarded to the court, which sentenced Igor Potokin to 6 years in a minimum-security correctional facility.

The victim’s mother thanks D. Voronin, Chief of the Especially Important Cases Department of the Belgorod Region Investigations Directorate and an investigator Y. Shevyakov “for honest scrupulous work”.

A woman from the Voronezh Region is grateful to investigators of the Saratov Region Investigations Directorate who completed investigating a criminal case initiated over rape and sexual violence over her underage daughter (paragraph “a”, part 3 of article 131, paragraph “a”, part 3 of article 132).

Investigating this case, it was especially difficult to prove the accused guilty as this especially serious crime against the underage girl had been committed by a group of persons under a preliminary conspiracy in 2009-2010. It had been more than a year and a half before the mother filed a charge which resulted in the need of a lot of investigating operations to collect and consolidate evidence.

In all, during the preliminary investigation the investigators interviewed more than 230 witnesses, carried out the check of the testimonies on the spot with participation of the victim, more than 30 searches and seizures, 15 examinations and 20 confrontations, assigned and carried out more than 30 forensic expert examinations, gave a lot of instructions to carry out investigating and search operations directed to find the witnesses, location of material evidence, control and record of telephone conversations under judicial decisions and carried out other procedural operations which made it possible to collect and consolidate the evidence of guiltiness of the underage accused. The case with the approved indictment was forwarded to the court in September 2012 to be tried on the merits.

In addition, a woman called from Krasnodar to thank the officers of the Krasnodar Territory Investigations Directorate who had taken steps to prosecute police officers who had abused and exceeded their official powers.

“Thanks to employees of the Investigative Committee who value the honor of the regiment, I felt protected, again got faith in people and our country”, a woman writes in her letter.