Today Abinsky district court in Krasnodar Territory has opened first hearings into a criminal case over death of people due to floods in the town of Krymsk, Krasnodar Territory in 2012. The accused are former Head of municipal entity Krymsk district Vasili Krutko, Head of Krymsk urban settlement Vladimir Ulanovsky, former head of Nizhnebakansky rural settlement Irina Ryabchenko, Acting head of municipal state-funded institution “Office for emergency management and civil protection of municipal entity Krymsk district” Viktor Zhdanov. Depending on the role of each one, they are charged with an official forgery (part 2 of article 292 of the RF Criminal Code), negligence (part 3 of article 293) and negligence and attempted swindling when receiving the payouts (part 3 of article 293, part 3 of article 30, part 3 of article 159.2 of the RF Criminal Code).
Investigation has taken about 8 months. The investigation crew at different points of the investigation was from 60 up to 155 officers. They have done a tremendous amount of work – examinations of crime scenes only took longer than a month, 137 people were found victims, 2.5 thousand witnesses were questioned. All this work has been accumulated in nearly 200 volumes of the criminal case. The investigation was unprecedented one not only because of the sizes of investigating operations, but the expert examinations which were undertaken to find the truth – geographical, hydrometeological and hydro-technical examinations. To accomplish those expert examinations investigators had to request data from military and civil satellites, involve specialists of different narrow areas, for example, in bridge building, examine reservoirs using helicopters.
During the first stage investigators undertook a number of investigating operations, including situation expert examinations, in order to give legal assessment to all actions of defense and law enforcement, intelligence agencies and officials of different levels. It was found that such serious tragedy had been caused by negligence Head of Krymsk urban settlement Vladimir Ulanovsky, former Head of municipal entity Krymsk district Vasili Krutko, Head of Krymsk urban settlement Vladimir Ulanovsky, former head of Nizhnebakansky rural settlement Irina Ryabchenko and Acting head of municipal state-funded institution “Office for emergency management and civil protection of municipal entity Krymsk district” Viktor Zhdanov.
In that situation the officials were concerned not with mitigation of the consequences, but to justify their inaction by all possible means. So they committed a forgery. Krutko, Ulanovsky and Ryabchenko gave instructions to their subordinates to prepare official documents containing false information about the meeting of the emergency management commission, declaring the state of emergency and notification of the people. One of the accused – Zhdanov – went even farer planning to make easy money on the people’s tragedy. Though his house not only had not been damaged, but had not been in the disaster zone at all, the accused put it and four more of his relatives in the list of houses damaged by the disaster. That was a quintessence of cynicism. His fraud was stopped timely during the investigation. Unfortunately, such tragedies help to understand who is who in this life. It made some people heroes risking their lives to save those they don’t even know, but brought out the worst in others.
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