On May 19, a judge of the 1st Eastern District Military Court in Khabarovsk removed his wife and public defender Aisha Mutaeva from the court hearing in the case of Apti Visaev, accused of preparing a terrorist attack. The woman is prohibited from attending the trial until the verdict. The reason was video recordings allegedly made by her in court and published on social networks.
As Dosh previously reported, 37-year-old Apti Visaev, who had previously served a 14-year sentence on charges of illegal arms trafficking, attempted murder of Russian security forces and terrorist attacks, is accused of persuading his acquaintance to commit a terrorist attack during the parade May 9, 2020 in Norilsk. Moreover, a victory parade that year was not even planned in the city due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The evidence in the case was the testimony of two classified witnesses and telephone correspondence. Visaev's defense claims that the charges are fabricated. According to the defendant’s wife Aisha Mutaeva, the correspondence on the phone was falsified after the seizure, but her requests for a technical verification of the accounts were rejected, and the phone disappeared from the file.
Even during the investigation, Visaev was transferred from the Norilsk pre-trial detention center to the Krasnoyarsk one. His wife and children moved to Krasnoyarsk to help him with his defense and attend court hearings. However, in March Visaev was transferred again - this time to Khabarovsk. Aisha Mutaeva has to pay for her lawyer’s airfare for each hearing. She herself also came to every meeting and brought her children with her.
“The tension in the relationship between the united court and prosecutor on the one hand and Apti’s defense on the other hand began to manifest itself extremely clearly from May 15, when we increasingly began presenting evidence of falsification of evidence in the criminal case against Apti, trying to attach expert opinions that directly testify about the lawlessness and falsification and innocence of Apti, to make extremely inconvenient petitions,” Mutaeva reported on her TG channel after leaving the courtroom. “The court filed a complaint against me for covering my husband’s case on social networks, and then for this reason I was removed from the courtroom before the verdict was announced. This is how much some people are afraid of people finding out the truth about what is really going on in our “fair and impartial” judicial system! They are trying to shut our mouths, hide the truth..."
According to Mutaeva, she did not take photos or videotape the process. “I only made an audio recording, this is permitted by the Criminal Procedure Code. At the same time, the consideration of the case is open, there are no restrictions on audio recording,” she noted. The woman attributes the court's decision to the support her husband receives in response to the publicity of his case. Mutaeva and her lawyer appealed the judge's decision. The lawyer also requested to review the certificate of video recordings, on the basis of which the judge removed Mutaeva from the hearing.
According to the testimony of the elder of the Chechen community of Norilsk, Igor Dashkuev, Visaev was not noticed in connections with radicals. After his first imprisonment, he married Aisha, a widow with four children, and devoted all his time to work and family. Visaev himself said that FSB officers convinced him to work for them, to inform about fellow countrymen living in the region. But Visaev refused and, perhaps, that’s why he became involved in a new case.
In April, Visaev, through his lawyers, spoke about the tortured conditions in which he was being kept in the pre-trial detention center: a cell of 6 square meters for two, no ventilation.