Human rights group agrees to monitor Putin murder plot case

The Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights has agreed to oversee the case of the two men suspected of plotting to assassinate President Vladimir Putin during the 2012 election campaign.

The lawyers say they were invited to monitor the legal process after the relatives of Ilya Pyanzin and Adam Osmayev requested assistance. The attorneys will act as go-betweens between the relatives of the accused and the media, and work to publicise their case, Interfax reports. The group has created a “Putin murder plot” page on Facebook, which many famous rights advocates, public activists and journalists have already joined.The two suspects were detained in February in the port of Odessa in Ukraine in connection with an explosion in an apartment block – which killed one man and injured Pyanzin the month previously. Both Osmayev and Pyanzin confessed to Ukrainian police that they had intended to kill President Putin on the orders of Russia’s most wanted terrorist Doku Umarov. The two men were then charged with forming a terrorist group and plotting a terrorist attack.Pyanzin – a 20-year-old Kazakh national – was extradited to Russia on August 25 and is currently kept in a Moscow pre-trial detention facility. He now claims he was only a witness in the case while the prime organizer of the plot was his flat mate Ruslan Madayev – who was killed in the blast, wrote Kommersant daily.Meanwhile, Osmayev remains in Ukraine. Earlier this month, a Ukrainian court ruled that he should be extradited to Russia. His lawyers challenged the decision in the European Court of Human Rights. After the Strasbourg-based court ruled it would review the case, Ukraine suspended Osmayev’s extradition.