19 September 2007, 11:06
Defendant in murder case of Stavropol students was under moral pressure
Andrei Keilin, accused of murdering two students on June 3 in Stavropol and released from custody on September 16, was put under moral pressure.
Andrei himself says that he was not affected physically. From the very first day, they ordered "not to touch him with a finger." But moral pressure was severe, and, according to Andrei, the "guards of the public order" did not hesitate to use the locker-room language in relation to the detainee and his friends.
"I was offered an option: I plead guilty and write a confession, and they 'organize' a verdict of eight years of conditional custody for me," the "Stavropolskaya Pravda" newspaper quotes the released young man. "They said that now the law admits it. But I rejected the option: "You may kill me, but I'll never take another person's crime."
The guy does not hide that at first he had certainly been highly demoralized. Moreover, the custody conditions were far from being normal. "In the cell for 12 they kept 19 persons," Andrei recollects, "and we even had to sleep in turn."
"Should we have failed to take an active position from the very start, they could have easily made a scapegoat out of Andrei," Vladimir Nesterov, Chairman of the Union of Slavic Communities of the Stavropol Territory, asserts as quoted by the "Kommersant" newspaper. "Moreover, it looks like the prosecutor's office has no other suspects."
