Vasily Kononov died
Soviet partisan Vasily Kononov, convicted by Latvian justice on charges of involvement in the murder of nine people in Latvia during World War II, died on Thursday night in Riga on 88-th year of life. Kononov was arrested in Latvia in 1998 on charges of war crimes. In 2000, he was sentenced to one and a half years in prison. Immediately after the announcement of the verdict, he was released, since he had already served this term.
After being released, the veteran accepted Russian citizenship, which was granted to him by presidential decree Vladimir Putin.
Latvia accused the former commander of the partisan detachment Kononov of killing nine civilians in 1944 - three of them were women.
According to Kononov himself, he executed local Nazi collaborators. According to him, these people were "policemen" - fighters of auxiliary police, which the German occupation administration formed from local residents. As the veteran stated, “civilians” gave the fascists the location of partisans, after which the Germans shot a detachment of soldiers from 12 people, and then burned their bodies.
Kononov, after an unsuccessful appeal in the Latvian courts in 2004, applied to the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. 19 June 2008, the court ruled that the Latvian authorities violated article 7 of the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and ordered to recover from Latvia 30 thousand euros as moral compensation.
In October 2008, the Latvian government filed an appeal to the Grand Chamber of the Strasbourg court. 17 last May in Strasbourg made the final decision that Latvia did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
Information