Word: russian
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...Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, imprisoned on tax evasion charges, told Russian Interior Ministry investigators that he was being denied medical care and subjected to "inhumane and humiliating conditions" in Moscow's notorious Butyrka jail. The treatment, he said, resulted from his refusal to give false testimony against himself and others. A month later, Magnitsky, 37, was dead. The Interior Ministry, which had charged the lawyer with conspiring to help William Browder, head of the London-based investment firm Hermitage Capital, allegedly evade more than $3 million in taxes, said it had not been aware that he had been...
...years in prison. The verdict mentions only "unidentified persons" as Markelov's co-conspirators and does not include any reference to the Hermitage subsidiaries being stolen. But the company says Markelov was likely just a bit player and notes the $230 million has yet to be returned to the Russian treasury. To get to the bottom of who was responsible for Magnitsky's death, "one needs to find out who got the stolen $230 million," says Browder, whose fund was once the largest foreign investor in Russia and who has been barred entry to the country since Russia deemed...
...ordinary smuggling bust. On Dec. 11, an old Russian plane landed in Thailand to refuel after taking off hours earlier from Pyongyang, North Korea. In its hull, police found 35 tons of explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and components for surface-to-air missiles, all being transported from North Korea in breach of U.N. sanctions. The captain and his crew were promptly arrested and charged with illegally transporting arms. But according to experts, they were only tiny cogs in a global network for arms trafficking that feeds off the castaway pilots and planes of the former Soviet Union. Suspected smugglers like...
...connections between the seized plane and smuggling networks in Russia and Eastern Europe. Griffiths says the plane was previously registered to a company that has links to self-professed Serbian gunrunner Tomislav Damnjanovic and to three companies controlled by Bout, who has been dubbed the "Merchant of Death" by Russian media. Last year, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after allegedly offering to sell weapons to U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officers posing as members of the Colombian rebel group FARC. While the U.S. seeks his extradition, Bout is being held at Klong Prem prison in Thailand, the same place where Petukhov...
...Chilean folksinger. His remains were exhumed recently to help determine just how he was killed in 1973, after he had been arrested by the brutal right-wing dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990. (An autopsy revealed that Jara was tormented in a game of Russian roulette and then executed by machine-gun fire.) This week, a Chilean judge ruled that former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, a Pinochet opponent who died in 1982, had actually been fatally poisoned by Pinochet agents...