Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has said Yerevan does not rule out taking its dispute with Russia over the management of the South Caucasus Railway to an international court if the issue cannot be resolved through negotiations. At the same time, he stressed that the Armenian authorities hope to settle the matter through talks.
During the debate in the military appellate court, the prosecutor asked to soften the sentence of Dagestani journalist Abdulmumin Gadzhiev, who was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
He also proposed to soften the punishment of other defendants - businessman Kemal Tambiev and former founder of the Ansar charity foundation Abubakar Rizvanov. They received 18 and 17.5 years in prison. The prosecutor did not specify what terms he proposed to assign them.
The convicts do not admit guilt, and one of them spoke about giving testimony under torture. Abdulmumin Gadzhiev himself spoke in the debate with the words: "In such cases, as a rule, there is fabricated evidence. But our case was fabricated in such a way that there was not even fabricated evidence left in it."
Gadzhiev recalled that the court summed up all the monetary transactions on the bank cards of the defendants and presented the entire turnover as financing terrorism.
“Where did the sum of 67 million come from? It turned out that they summed up all the transactions on 14 bank cards of people who did not know each other. Every time I bought bananas for my children at Pyaterochka, did I finance ISIS? It’s good that I paid for the bus fare in cash,” Gadzhiev was indignant.
Recall that, according to the investigation, the journalist published materials about the Ansar charity fund, without mentioning that part of the money collected was sent to the Islamic State, an organization banned in the Russian Federation. At the same time, the results of the examinations and the testimony of witnesses confirmed the defendant’s innocence.