vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #560 / Crime watch / Reading article...

On March 9 Primorye’s regional court sentenced two men to a 15-year and 13-year imprisonment respectively for organizing and performing a contract hit murder of Ussurisk Duma deputy and businessman Yuri Yemets in June of 2004.

Nikolai Khomenko, 36, was found guilty of planning and organizing the murder and received a 15- year sentence in jail. Andrei Zotin, 31, were found guilty of participating in a contract murder and was sentenced to 13 years in jail, a press press statement from Primorye’s Prosecutor’s Office reported.

Yemets, who was once head of Ussurisk's duma and director of Ussurisk Balsam, the Russian Far East's largest liquor producers, was shot in the spine early June 2004 from a car while entering his office on the town’s Lenina Street. The deputy was taken to hospital but died half an hour later.

The investigation found that Khomenko received an order from unidentified people to organize the murder of Yemets. Khomenko in his turn gave order to two men, Zotin and Dmitry Medvedev, to commit a contract hit murder of Yemets for a sum of $15,000 to be paid each.

On June 7, Zotin and Medvedev arrived to the office of Yemets in Ussurisk and waited for the deputy who used to drive to his office in his Toyota Land Cruiser jeep. When Yemets was leaving his car at 11.25 a.m. local time, Medvedev fired one bullet into his spine. Then the criminals fled the scene. Medvedev is still under international search, the statement said.

Prosecutors said that the criminal case against people who ordered the murder of Yemets to Khomenko is to be continued. Investigators intend to find the true plotters of this contract hit.