Alexander Gorobets: The gang is on trial, but its guns are still shooting

Vasily Kalinichenko, a well-known lawyer, was killed in the city of Odessa. Kalinichenko was a member of the regional lawyers' association. Vasily Kalinichenko used to work with the police; in particular, he was the chief of the investigation department of the transport police. In January of 2002, they were going to appoint him to the position of the judge of the Kievsky district court of Odessa. The session of the Supreme Justice Council of Ukraine was to take place on January 20 in order to come to a conclusion regarding the issue.

Kalinichenko refused to participate in the litigation that was taking place in the regional court of appeal pertaining to the criminal case of Vasily Mariyanchuk’s gang, which was the most talked about issue in Odessa over the recent period of time. The grounds for that refusal was Kalinichenko’s another employment. The mentioned group is considered to be guilty of a dozen assassinations. Kalinichenko was defending one of the people on trial, Gennady Baby, nicknamed "Krasny" (the Red).

The same regional court has recently considered the criminal case about the “Lola” group, which is a branch of the mentioned gang. The court remitted the case for further examination, but the Office of the Public Prosecutor appealed against that decision. The Supreme Court did not support the colleagues in Odessa and sent the case for new consideration. They say that the prisoners were not happy about such a development of the events, and they refused the services of the legal company that was defending them. Kalinichenko was the head of that company, the company that failed to defend its clients.

As the specialists said, this was the reason for the brutal revenge. When the investigators were examining the site on which Kalinichenko was murdered, they found the cases of the cartridges that were used by the guns of that criminal group.

The fifty-four-year-old lawyer left for the office in his car. When he got out of it, there were shots fired. The eyewitnesses told the police that they heard the sound of a car that was pulling out really fast. The car was waiting for the assassin in a street nearby.

There are no doubts it was an assassination: the way it was all performed and the shot in the head of the victim; these facts testify to that. As investigators say, an assassin fired from a non-standard smooth-bore Makarov gun. These guns are produced illegally in garages or cellars with parts and components stolen from weapon-manufacturing enterprises.

The chairman of the regional arbitration court, Boris Vikhrov, was murdered with the similar weapon two years ago. The Office of the Public Prosecutor of the Kievsky district court of the city of Odessa instituted legal proceedings based on Vasily Kalinichenko’s assassination.

Alexander Gorobets PRAVDA.Ru Kiev Ukraine

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov

Read the original in Russian: http://www.pravda.ru/main/2001/12/28/35215.html