Lawyer denies witness in Budanov murder trial has made contradictory statements
MOSCOW. Jan 21 (Interfax) - A lawyer has dismissed allegations by Russia's Investigative Committee that the defense lawyers of the man accused of murdering Col. Yury Budanov bribed a witness to make statements in court that appear to clear the defendant.
Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin claimed earlier that Monday's testimony of witness Alexander Yevtukhov differed from what he had said before. Markin said Murad Musayev and Darya Trenina, lawyers for defendant Yusup Temerkhanov, were suspected of bribing Yevtukhov.
"None of the witnesses has changed their testimony in this case," Musayev told Interfax.
"The witness, Alexander Yevtukhov, has been giving consistent testimonies from day one. In June 2011, immediately after Budanov's murder, when I didn't have the slightest involvement in this case, the witness described the criminal as a fair-haired young man about 175 centimeters tall," Musayev said.
Yevtukhov was afterward questioned on several other occasions, "long before the defendant was arrested," Musayev said. "Today he repeated the same evidence in court. There was no change to his evidence."
Musayev claimed that Yevtukhov had been impossible to contact for several days. The lawyer claimed the witness had been abducted, but that no legal assessment had been made.
Furthermore, Musayev said, Temerkhanov had been beaten and that his defense had complained about it, but that the Investigative Committee had opted against taking up the matter. "Anything that the defense puts before the investigative authorities ends up in nothing though all the facts have been proved. It's a mutual cover-up principle," the attorney said.
"It's one more case of facts and circumstances being lumped together instead of a case of solving a murder," Musayev said. "A witness came again and repeated what he had already told the investigators: the man who's in the dock is not Budanov's murderer."
