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Russian Court Convicts Ex-Gitmo Inmates
Associated Press
May 12, 2006
MOSCOW -- A Russian court on Friday sentenced two former GuantanamoBay inmates and another man to prison terms ranging from 11 to 15 years in connection with a gas pipeline explosion, officials said.
A jury last week found Ravil Gumarov, Timur Ishmuratov and Fanis Shaikhutdinov guilty of terrorism, the Prosecutor General's office said in a statement.
No injuries were reported in the January 2005 explosion in the VolgaRiverrepublic of Tatarstan,but the pipeline was damaged.
The three had been acquitted in September, but Russia's Supreme Court threw out the verdict and ordered the new trial.
Gumarov and Ishmuratov were among seven Russian men detained in Afghanistan by U.S. forces on suspicion of fighting for the Taliban regime and released from the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2004. They were briefly held in jail upon returning to Russia, but were freed after Russian investigators found no evidence of their involvement with the Taliban.
Last year, the three accused Russian law enforcement bodies of trying to force confessions through torture.
Russian rights groups criticized their trial, saying that the jury was not swayed by defense evidence including mobile phone records and "witness testimony confirming alibis," and that evidence presented by prosecutors as proof of the terrorism charge included legally obtained Muslim literature.
Citing initial police reports, rights groups have claimed the pipeline blast was caused by technical problems, not an attack.
Other former Guantanamo prisoners have faced harassment or abuse at the hands of Russian law enforcement agencies, which critics say are persecuting innocent Muslims in a misguided and counterproductive effort to check Islamic extremism.
Tatarstan has a large Muslim population.
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