Moscow, April 13: A top Russian federal judge who had presided over several high- profile cases was on Monday shot dead in Moscow as he left his apartment building.
The Russian police said an unknown gunman opened fire at 8.15 am on Eduard Chuvashov as the latter left his apartment block on Strelbishchenshy Pereulok in the heart of Moscow. The attacker fled the scene immediately.
A police spokesperson said the attack on the judge had been captured on CCTV cameras. There were also reports that the assailant appeared to be in his twenties.
Chuvashov, 47, specialised in handling complicated high- profile criminal cases and felonies. He had presided over several cases involving nationalist organisations and had received death threats, a police officer said.
In December 2008, Chuvashov sentenced a group of Russian teenage skinheads for carrying out 20 racially motivated killings.
Seven defendants were handed prison sentences ranging from six to 20 years for killing non- Slavic migrants in Russia between 2006 and 2007.
Earlier this year, Chuvashov sentenced nine members of the White Wolves — a white supremacist gang — to up to 23 years in prison for perpetrating a string of racist attacks in Moscow.
The group carried out 11 brutal murders.
They filmed the attacks on cell phones and uploaded the footage onto ultra- nationalist websites.
According to the website of the Moscow city court, Chuvashov was scheduled on Monday to look into the case of Vladimir Belashev, a former member of the Russian interior ministry in charge of fighting organised crime, who was accused of taking part in the bombings of two statues near Moscow.
Belashev was arrested in April 1998 and was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment for terrorism offences. In 2008, a European Union court in Strasbourg ordered Russia to pay €10,000 ( about Rs 5.93 lakh) in compensation to Belashev after he complained that he had spent five years in prison awaiting sentencing.
Chuvashov also worked on the case of Federal Drug Control Service officer Alexander Bulbov, who was allegedly accused of embezzling $ 3.2 million ( Rs 14.14 crore), illegal phone tapping and offering bribes.
Bulbov was released on bail in November 2009 after 25 months in pretrial detention.
At the time of his arrest, Bulbov and his colleagues had been investigating a high- profile furniture smuggling case, which resulted in the arrests of five senior Federal Security Service officers.
Chuvashov’s killing has sparked comparisons of the similar murders last year of high- profile lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova in Moscow.
Last November, two skinhead members of white supremacist groups were charged with the murders.
Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted an official as saying Chuvashov had been getting constant threats and ultranationalist groups had urged their followers on websites to lynch him.
—Agencies