Arakcheev, convicted for murdering residents of Chechnya, signs-in his appeal to Medvedev

Sergey Arakcheev, a former officer of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) of the Russian Federation, convicted for murdering three peaceful residents of Chechnya, is now calling Russians, in the pages of his Internet website, to sign his appeal to President of Russia Dmitri Medvedev. As of today, the letter has been signed by 1284 persons.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that in December 2007 the North-Caucasian Regional Military Court, after two initial trials where jurymen acquitted the defendants, sentenced former MIA's Internal Troops officers Sergey Arakcheev and Evgeniy Khudyakov to 15 and 17 years of imprisonment accordingly for murdering three peaceful residents of the Chechen Republic.

On August 28, 2008, the Supreme Court of Russia upheld the verdict.

The appeal placed in Arakcheev's website runs: "For us, same as for two boards of jurymen, innocence of Sergey Arakcheev and Evgeniy Khudyakov is beyond doubt - indeed, it is confirmed by numerous evidences; among them, there are testimonies of almost thirty witnesses, orders, examination conclusions and other documents."

It also states that the trial was not impartial.

"We assert that the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, having cancelled the acquittal verdicts to Sergey Arakcheev and Evgeniy Khudyakov and deprived them of the right to have their case considered by a jury, admitted their discrimination, having actually placed the militaries, who had honestly fulfilled their duty in Chechnya, into position of second-grade citizens," runs the document.

The Arakcheev's website says that the attached resource contains over 400 documents (evidences of witnesses, examination results, petitions of the defence), about 3.5 gigabytes of audio records of judicial sessions with their scripts, and over 1700 scanned pages of the criminal case of Khudyakov and Arakcheev.