Domodedovo airport de facto owner Kamenshchik put under house arrest until April 18
MOSCOW. Feb 19 (Interfax) - Moscow's Basmanny Court has ruled to place Dmitry Kamenshchik, the board chairman of the Domodedovo airport, under house arrest until April 18.
Kamenshchik has been charged with the provision of services not complying with security requirements in the context of the 2011 terrorist attack.
The court handed down the ruling after hearing the investigation's motion on applying a pretrial restrictive measure against Kamenshchik on Friday, an Interfax correspondent reported from the courthouse.
"The court rules to grant the investigation's motion and order Dmitry Kamenshchik's house arrest until April 18 as a restrictive measure," Judge Yelena Lenskaya said in handing down the ruling.
The court thus turned down a motion by Kamenshchik's defense lawyers Yevgenia Ionova and Mikhail Kolpakov on granting him 15 million rubles bail and disregarded the prosecutors' opinion that Kamenshchik's detention and prosecution was unlawful.
The Prosecutor General's Office reasoned that earlier judicial rulings that have taken legal force determined that there was no cause-and-effect relation between the Domodedovo management's actions and the death of 37 people, as their death had in fact been caused by a suicide bomber's actions.
Kamenshchik himself said he was not going to hide and was determined to prove both his own innocence and the innocence of the other suspects in the case. "It is a matter of honor for me to prove that neither myself nor airport employees are guilty of anything," he said.
The defense team also referred to the Moscow Region Court's sentence handed down on the suicide bomber's accomplices and the Basmanny Court's and the Presnensky Court's rulings declining lawsuits by the aggrieved parties against the Domodedovo airport's management.
The defense team insisted that security checks at the entrance to the airport can be seen only as assistance to law enforcement agencies.
"Security checks as part of aviation security measures imply only preflight inspection, while inspection at the entrance is not related to aviation security measures," a lawyer said.
Lawyer Kolpakov pointed out that about 1,150 terrorist attacks had been committed in Russia over the past ten years. "The owners of affected facilities have never been held liable in any of these instances, not to mention criminally," he said.
Sergei Dubinsky, the head of the investigative team, accused the airport management of cynicism and insisted that a 15 million-ruble bail is too small for a man whose monthly income is 62 million rubles. In response to this, the lawyers said their client's monthly income was in fact 10 million rubles.
