Igor was killed 8 years ago. The killers, the members of Tagiryanovskaya gang, who executed this paid murder, were sentenced, while the organizer and mediator were not. The editorial board of Novaya Gazeta has the names of people involved in the murder in question. Those are the Moscow businessman and a friend of Tagiryanovskaya gang Pave Sopot, and the former vice-governor of Lipezk region, today’s director of a meat processing plant Dorovskoi.    

Nonetheless, neither Tatarstan Prosecutor’s Office nor the Investigative Committee, instructed by its head Alexander Bastrykin after our insistent demands, started a criminal case against the mentioned persons.   

We wrote requests again as the checking had been done like a mere formality and Sopot and Dorovskoi were not even interrogated. We demanded that the case materials be passed not to Tatarstan but to Moscow where the crime was committed. It appeared that they had listened to us and to the lawyer of the grieved party. The documents were required to be examined by the Investigative Committee of the prosecutor’s office of the Central Federal District. And we even received a couple of calls from there…    

Well, the outcome was the paper saying that a decision had been taken of refusal of starting a criminal case due to absence of crime in the act by S.B.Dorovskoi and P.K.Sopot.  

That is, the vice governor asking Mr. Sopot - who was engaged then in a business related to wringing out people’s debts – to find people able to get through with the journalists, and Mr. Sopot who found such people in the Tagiryanovskaya gang, they have committed no crime!  

Well, it’s not quite clear how exactly the junior justice adviser V.V.Yaremenko came to that conclusion. Not only hasn’t he examined all the involved persons and witnesses, but even his response he sent to the wrong address: for some reasons, the letter came to the Novaya Gazeta’s editor’s home address and to the lawyer who has not been dealing with this case for a year.

The lawyer of the grieved party, Stanislav Markelov pointed in his application that “this fact proves that the Investigative Committee treated formally the application about crime and did not even consider the presented facts and failed to define who had sent that application to them.” Besides, no grounds were given for the taken decision. “The text of the decision about refusal to start up the criminal case was not presented to the grieved party at all. The nature of the committed violation of the procedure gives grounds to thinking that the Investigative Committee was guided not with the wish to consider the matter on its merits, but evaded intentionally the consideration of the presented circumstances.”   

Well, it only remains to be added that no organizers of any murder of Russian journalists has been established and sentenced so far. It appears that the relatives and colleagues of those slain address at the wrong bodies too.