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| Roza and Visa Kungaev, the victim’s parents |
Demonstrators included students of Chechen higher educational institutions, and members of the republic’s rights-defence organisations, civic movements and political parties, in particular ‘United Russia’, the Information Centre of the Chechen Republic’s Union of NGOs has reported. Protesters carried posters saying: “Murderers Belong in Prison”, “No Freedom for Budanov”, “The Court and Budanov – in Cahoots?”.
Participants expressed strong protest at the decision of Dimitrovgradskii Court in Ul’ianovskaia region to grant early conditional release to the sadist Budanov. Demonstrators have described this decision as bringing shame upon the Russian justice system.
In the opinion of rights-defenders, there were no grounds whatsoever for the ex-colonel’s early release. Budanov had received negative reports from the penal colony administration; he had shown no remorse for his crime; and moreover, he had threatened to murder the father of the girl whom he had tormented. It should also be noted that Kungaeva’s family have yet to be paid any compensation, the Information Centre’s report emphasised.
The report states that any reasonable person would naturally be strongly opposed to and outraged by such benevolent and soft treatment of Yurii Budanov, rapist and murderer in officer’s epaulets. In the opinion of many residents of Chechnya, the decision only testifies once again to the fact that war criminals who have perpetrated atrocities against civilians in the Chechen Republic can remain confident of their continued impunity and complete lack of accountability.
The atrocious crime committed in Chechnya by Colonel Yurii Budanov, commander of the 160th tank regiment, became known in March 2000. According to military procuracy data, the drunken Colonel Budanov arrived in an armoured vehicle in the village of Tangi-Chu, located not far from where his unit was dislocated, and together with soldiers serving under him, abducted 17-year-old school pupil Elga Kungaeva from her home. Later, in his commander’s trailer, he raped the girl and strangled her. (The rape was for some reason not taken into consideration by the court.) After the murder, the colonel ordered his soldiers to take his victim’s corpse to the forst and bury it.
“Just as soon as the crime was discovered, Budanov attempted to evade responsibility. At first he feigned mental illness, and then three and a half years after the beginning of the investigation he suddenly ‘remembered’ that the school pupil whom he had murdered had been a ‘sniper’. Jingo-patriots came out in force in support of the rapist and murder, headed up by another sadist and leader of punitive expeditions General Vladimir Shamanov, under whom the ‘hero’ had served. It was only thanks to the constant public attention paid to this notorious case that Budanov’s defenders failed to cover it up and to enable the murder to avoid responsibility. Budanov was sentenced to 10 years in a strict regime colony. Now Budanov may be released early. It is not ruled that General Shamanov, who today occupies a high-ranking position in the Defence Ministry of Russia, may once again take him under his ‘wing’,” the SNO’s 26 December press release says.
