The examination of Kungaeva’s body revealed… injuries… on the… neck… , the face… , bruising in the right suborbital area, on the inner surface of the right thigh, hemorrhaging into the… mouth and… of the left upper jaw. The corpse was unclothed….
The medical examination of the corpse… established that the injuries discovered on the neck had been caused ante-mortem…. The cause of death was pressure on the neck from a blunt object. The bruising on Kungaeva’s face and left thigh, the hemorrhaging into the… mouth, the injury to the right eye resulted from the action of a blunt object(s)…. The act causing injury was a blow. The injuries referred to occurred ante-mortem….
Interviewed as a witness, Captain Alexey Viktorovich Simukhin, investigator, military prosecutor’s office, testified that on March 27, 2000, he received orders to bring Budanov to the landing strip of Army Unit 13206 in order for the latter to be transported to Hankala.
During the flight Budanov was very agitated, inquiring how he should behave, what he should say, and what he should do. On the morning of March 28, 2000, Simukhin traveled out as a member of the investigating team to… locate the body of Kungaeva…. Simukhin wished to note that the burial site had been very carefully camouflaged, covered with turf…. The body was in a half-sitting “fetal” position and was completely naked.
From October 1, 1999, as a member of the 160th Regiment, Bagreev took part in the counterterrorist operation. He had no scores to settle with Budanov and Fedorov.
On March 20, 2000, the intelligence company moved from… Komsomolskoe to… Tangi. It had been decided to hold a competition between the regiment’s subsections to decide which company was the most orderly. The antiaircraft section came in first. Fedorov disagreed with this result and assured everybody that the intelligence company was better…. In order to persuade Budanov of this… , Fedorov insisted an inspection should be carried out of the company’s site.
After 18.00 hours Budanov, Fedorov, Silivanets, and Arzumanyan arrived at the site. Budanov was intoxicated but entirely able to control himself. Fedorov was very drunk, his speech was slurred, and he was unsteady on his feet. Fedorov tried to persuade Budanov to check the combat readiness of the company. Budanov refused three or more times but Fedorov continued to insist. Budanov yielded to Fedorov’s demands, ordering, “Firing positions. Prepare for combat.”
Bagreev immediately ran toward the company’s trenches. Fedorov ran behind him. The vehicles took up their firing positions. Budanov was at the Signals Center. He knew that each vehicle always had a high-explosive fragmentation shell in its rammer tray ready for firing. There were no grounds to open fire on the village at the time, other than Fedorov’s order.
After the vehicles’ gun crews had taken up their positions, he gave orders to the crews to unload the fragmentation shell, load a hollow-charge shell, and fire it over the houses. Such a shell, shot upward, if encountering no obstacle, self-destructs. A fragmentation charge has no such self-destruction mechanism….
Vehicle No. 380 fired once over the roofs of the houses in the village. Fedorov saw this, leapt on to the second APC, and ordered the gun layer to fire at Tangi. Dissatisfied with Bagreev’s actions, Fedorov seized him by his clothing and abused him with obscene language. Bagreev was summoned by Budanov. When he arrived at the Signals Center, Budanov and Fedorov were both there. They beat him up.
Inspection has established that to the southwest of the staff headquarters of Army Unit 13206, at a distance of 25 meters from the regimental command post on March 27, 2000, there was a pit above which three square-edged planks had been placed. The pit was a hollow in the ground 2.4 meters long, 1.6 meters wide, and 1.3 meters deep. The walls were faced with brick, and the bottom was earthen.
[Thus the first description in a Russian legal document of a Zindan. These special torture pits were introduced on an extensive scale during the second Chechen war. They are to be found in almost every military unit in Chechnya and are generally used for detaining arrested Chechens, as well as privates who are in disgrace. It is rare for them to be used against junior officers.]
Witness Private Dmitry Igorevich Pakhomov testified that on March 26, 2000, at about 20.00 hours, Fedorov shouted at Bagreev, “I’ll teach you to carry out my orders, you puppy.” Bagreev was deluged with insults…. Fedorov gave the order to tie Bagreev up and put him in the pit. There had been earlier occasions when the squad had tied up drunken contract soldiers before putting them in the pit, but for such a thing to be done to the commanding officer of the intelligence company was unbelievable.
Approximately one hour later, the squad was again alerted to an emergency by Budanov. When they arrived, Bagreev was lying on the ground. Budanov and Fedorov once more started kicking him. After this, on Budanov’s orders, Bagreev was again tied up and put in the pit. Fedorov then jumped down and began beating Bagreev up in the pit. Bagreev was shouting and groaning…. Silivanets jumped down into the pit and pulled Fedorov out. At about 02.00 hours Pakhomov was in his tent when he heard rifle fire. As he later learned, this was Suslov shooting in order to bring Fedorov to his senses. He was again trying to reach Bagreev.
Budanov and Fedorov were charged. The criminal case against Grigoriev, Li-En-Shou, and Yegorov was closed as the result of an amnesty.
The expert conclusion of the Standing Interdepartmental Forensic Psychological and Psychiatric Board was that Budanov was not, at the time of the act with which he was charged in respect to Bagreev, in a transitory pathological state of dysfunction or in a state of pathological or physiological incapacity. At the time of the murder of Kungaeva, Budanov was in a transitory, situationally induced, cumulative psychoemotional state and was not fully aware of the nature and significance of his acts or able to use his free will to control them.
In the summer of 2001, Budanov’s case moved to trial. The first judge was Colonel Victor Kostin of the district military court of the North Caucasus, in Rostov-on-Don, in the same location as the North Caucasus Military District staff headquarters, which, as Russians say, is “fighting the war in Chechnya.” The influence of the military on every aspect of life in Rostov-on-Don is enormous. The main military hospital, through which thousands of soldiers crippled and wounded in Chechnya have passed, is located there, and the city is home to the families of many officers posted to Chechnya. In a sense this is a frontline city, and this circumstance had a significant impact on the development of the Budanov trial. Pickets and demonstrations outside the courtroom, in support of Budanov, provided the trial with a running commentary, with slogans like “Russia in the Dock!” and “Free Russia’s Hero!”
The first phase of the hearings lasted for more than a year, from the summer of 2001 until October 2002. The purpose of the proceedings seemed not to be to decide whether Budanov was guilty or not but to absolve him of all sins and crimes. Throughout the hearings, Judge Kostin displayed manifest support for Budanov, turning down all representations on behalf of the Kungaevs and finding reasons to refuse to admit any witness who might speak against Budanov. He even refused to question Generals Gerasimov and Verbitsky, on the grounds that they had given permission to arrest the murderous colonel.