NB: This story has been updated with the court’s verdict and sentence. To read the new story, please click here.
MOSCOW, September 10 (RAPSI) – Prosecutors in the trial of a man charged with plotting to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin have called for a jail sentence of 15 years, RAPSI legal news agency reported Tuesday.
Ilya Pyanzin, currently on trial in the Moscow City Court charged with having plotted to kill Putin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, entered into a plea bargain with prosecutors and is due to be sentenced later on Tuesday.
The alleged group of would-be assassins, consisting of Chechen-born Adam Osmayev and Ruslan Madayev, as well as Kazakh-born Pyanzin, was exposed in January 2012 after a homemade bomb accidentally detonated in an apartment in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, killing Madayev.
Russian and Ukrainian security services later reported that two men had been arrested. Pyanzin, who was detained first, told Ukrainian security officers that his accomplices had been making a bomb to assassinate then-Prime Minister Putin and Kadyrov. They had allegedly planned to detonate the bomb close to Putin's motorcade as he drove through Moscow.
Pyanzin was handed over to Russia in 2012. Osmayev's extradition has been suspended until the European Court of Human Rights passes a judgment on the lawfulness of his extradition.
