MOSCOW, December 20 (RIA Novosti) - Moscow's District Military Court ruled Wednesday that the Russian prosecutor general must apologize to a serviceman acquitted in the case of murdered investigative journalist Dmitry Kholodov.
The judge said that Yury Chaika "must offer an official apology on behalf of the state for the illegal criminal prosecution of Konstantin Mirzayants."
Under current legislation, an apology must be offered by the chief prosecutor himself, or by any other official of the Prosecutor General's Office at his request.
The court also ordered the Finance Ministry to pay 9.7 million rubles (some $368,000) to Mirzayants in compensation, but Mirzayants' lawyer demanded compensation of some 11 million rubles ($417,000).
Mirzayants and his five co-defendants were charged with organizing the killing of Kholodov, who was investigating corruption in the Russian military, on orders from the top brass. They allegedly acted to prevent Kholodov from disclosing plans for Russia's first military campaign in Chechnya in December 1994.
A reporter for the popular daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, Kholodov was killed in an explosion in his office in October 1994, after receiving a booby-trapped briefcase which he thought contained documents from a contact in the intelligence services.
In 2002, Moscow's District Military Court handed down a not-guilty verdict to the six defendants in the trial. The Supreme Court upheld the verdict in March 2005.
Former paratrooper Pavel Popovskikh, who was twice acquitted on charges of murdering the journalist, was the first co-defendant in the Kholodov case to sue the Russian government for damages.
Popovskikh demanded 52 million rubles (some $2 million) to compensate for moral and material damages sustained during his 52 months in pre-trial detention (February 1998 to June 2002).
But the Supreme Court ruled that Popovskikh should receive only 2.5 million rubles ($95,000) and relieved the Prosecutor General from having to present an official apology.
