ZURICH (Switzerland), October 25 (RIA Novosti) - A public prosecutor demanded Tuesday that a panel of judges of the cantonal Swiss court in Zurich sentence Vitaly Kaloyev, charged with killing a Swiss air traffic controller, to 12 years in a high-security prison.
Ulrich Weder said the killing of Peter Nielsen, an employee with the Swiss company Skyguide who had been on duty July 2, 2002, when an airplane collision killed 71, including Kaloyev's wife and two children, was a premeditated murder, not a manslaughter.
Nielsen, 36, was found stabbed to death outside his home in the Zurich suburb of Klotten February 24, 2004. Kaloyev, a 49-year-old Russian national, was detained in connection with the killing the following day.
Earlier on Tuesday, Kaloyev pleaded not guilty. "I did not come to Switzerland to kill someone," he said to the Zurich court. "If I had had the intention to kill someone, I wouldn't have waited for one-and-a-half to two years."
In July 2002, a Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 passenger jet on a charter flight from Moscow to Barcelona collided in midair with a DHL Boeing-757 cargo plane en route to Brussels. There were no survivors.
The Russian plane was carrying 57 passengers, including 52 children from Bashkortostan on their way to a Spanish seaside resort, as well as 12 crewmembers. The Boeing-757 had no passengers on board. The collision occurred over Germany, 120 kilometers south of Stuttgart, just minutes after German air traffic controllers had handed over to Swiss colleagues.
German investigators blamed the crash on Skyguide and, partially, on the two Russian pilots.
