Russia presents note to Estonia over investigation of Ganin death

Photo: Teet Malsroos / Õhtuleht

Russia has presented a note to Estonia demanding faster investigation of the killing of Russian national Dmitry Ganin during the riots of April 2007.

Spokespeople for the Estonian Foreign Ministry said the Russian Foreign Ministry delivered a note to the Estonian embassy in Moscow on Thursday demanding that investigation into the killing of Dmitry Ganin be sped up and the perpetrators of the crime be brought to responsibility.

«We will respond to the note during the established period of time,» the spokespeople said. The criminal investigation opened into the killing of Ganin is still ongoing and the police and the prosecutor's office continue to investigate the case, they said.

«Despite assurances by Estonian officials regarding their willingness to bring the investigation to an end, it is unfortunately not moving ahead,» Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said in a commentary circulated in Moscow on Thursday. «The actual inaction of Estonian law enforcement agencies cannot but cause our serious concerns, considering that the statute of limitations in this case will expire in three years. Is this what the Estonian side is aiming for?» he added.

According to Lukashevich a note sent to the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs demands that exhaustive measures be taken to speed up the investigation and identify and punish the people responsible for the Russian citizen's death.

Riots by mostly Russian-speaking young people broke out in Tallinn and some northeast Estonian towns at the end of April 2007 after the government started preparations for the relocation of a Red Army soldier monument from Tallinn's city center to a military cemetery. During the riots Ganin received a stab wound as a result of which he died. Investigation did not identify his killer. Russia has used Ganin's death against Estonia in its propaganda war on several occasions.

After Ganin's death the Estonian police opened two parallel criminal investigations to find out who beat Ganin and another young Russian-speaking man Ganin was together with at the time, identified by his first name as Oleg.

Based on witness accounts, police investigators soon identified the circle of suspects who might have carried out the attack but failed to garner any evidence as regards how or by whom the 21-year-old was deprived of his life.

With the help of statements from the suspects and eyewitness accounts investigators started to put together a picture of the events that ended tragically in Tallinn's Tatari Street in the early hours of April 27. It was revealed that even though the police had ordered everyone to leave central Tallinn on the said night, Ganin and Oleg remained in the area looking at looted shopfronts and picking up and pocketing items stolen from the looted stores that were scattered on the streets.

Police found no evidence that Ganin and Oleg had personally looted any stores. Ganin and Oleg occurred on Tatari Street at a time when the attack on the Woodstock bar had already ended. Passing the shattered barfront, Oleg picked up from the ground a candle holder made of glass and tossed it against the bar's already broken front window, failing to notice that exactly at that time young Estonian men who had defended the bar against attackers some time before had come onto the street from the basement of the institution. The men who had emerged from the bar's basement rushed toward Oleg and Ganin, and even though the latter ran away they were caught on the corner of the Tatari and Sakala streets, where the men started to beat them with their hands and their feet, presumably also using a pool stick.