Eight people were sentenced to life imprisonment in the case over the explosion on the Crimean Bridge. According to the report, those convicted include six business owners, a farmer, and a truck driver.
Nearly all of them have one or more children. The wife of one of the convicted men has cancer. All defendants in the case say they do not admit guilt.
At the same time, Ukrainian special services had previously acknowledged that they organized the truck bombing on the bridge. Against that backdrop, lawyers and human rights advocates question the grounds for the verdicts.
In their view, law enforcement may have prosecuted people who only had some connection to the cargo being transported but did not know what exactly they were carrying. As the publication argues, that version would help explain why responsibility was assigned not to the organizers, but to incidental participants in the logistics chain.
The outlet’s interlocutors also believe this may have been an attempt to cover up serious failures by the FSB, since the dangerous cargo passed through several checkpoints.
The report raises questions about who the convicted people are, how they were tied to the case, and whether a person in Russia who is only accidentally connected to such a chain of events can receive a life sentence.