Today, the Riga City Court has asked the judge of a higher instance court to evaluate the possibility of extending the permissible term of detention of the accused in the case of the murder of the administrator Mārtiņš Bunkus, LETA agency found out.
Currently, all three defendants in the Bunkus case are in custody. The accused have already spent almost two years in custody.
The Criminal Procedure Law stipulates that the term of detention for a person suspected or accused of committing a particularly serious crime may not exceed 24 months, of which a person is allowed to be detained for no longer than 15 months in pre-trial proceedings. The investigative judge in the pre-trial process and the judge of a higher level court during the trial can each extend the deadline by another three months, if the initiator of the process has not allowed unjustified delay or if the person implementing the defense has deliberately delayed the progress of the process, or if the faster completion of the process was not possible due to special complexity.
The judge of a higher level court can extend this term by another three months, if the initiator of the process has not allowed unjustified delay and public safety cannot be guaranteed by applying another security measure.
The question of extending the term of detention is examined by a judge of a higher level court in a closed court session, giving the opportunity to express their opinion to the person whose detention is being decided, his defender and representative, as well as the prosecutor.
In the case, businessmen Mihails Ulmans and Aleksandrs Babenko are accused of inciting or ordering murder. Ulmans is also charged with aiding and abetting murder.
Accusations have also been brought against the alleged killer who fired the shots – Russian citizen Viktor Krivoshej, born in 1974. He is also accused of carrying and transporting a firearm and ammunition without a relevant permit and of disclosing information obtained in pre-trial criminal proceedings without the permission of the investigator or prosecutor.
The organizer of the murder has not been charged because he died a violent death. This person was Gennady Valagin, convicted in the case of the once influential criminal group of Ivan Kharitonov. He was shot in March 2022 in Riga, Pļavnieki.
On the other hand, the criminal proceedings against one person were terminated, as no support for this crime was found in his activities. This person is Arkadijs Yudins, born in 1970.
In the pre-trial criminal proceedings, the circumstances of the commission of the criminal offenses and the persons involved, including their mutual distribution of roles for the implementation of the crime, were clarified. The prosecutor’s office believes that the motive for the crime committed by the defendants was dislike of the administrator while he was performing his professional duties. Bunkus was the administrator of SIA “Rego Trade”, while Ulmans was a former board member of this company.
The LTV program “De facto” previously reported that 100,000 euros were offered to the organizer and 200,000 euros to the executor for the murder of Bunkus. More than 100,000 euros were not paid to the performer.
All the accused have been remanded in custody as a security measure.
