[Regnum] The Investigative Committee has completed the preliminary investigation into the assassination attempt on Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Rossiya Segodnya media group and the RT TV channel,and TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak. This was reported on August 24 by Dmitry Dzhulai, a lawyer for one of the defendants in the case.
"The defendants are familiarizing themselves with the case materials. The volume is quite large," the human rights activist said in a conversation with TASS.
He did not provide any other details.
Dzhulai is defending Mikhail Baryshnikov, whom investigators believe to be one of the organizers of the crime. Seven other people are also involved in the case. They are in custody. Some of the accused were minors at the time of the crime.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, earlier on August 24 it became known from the case materials that a confrontation was held with the person accused of preparing the assassination attempts on Simonyan and Sobchak.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) prevented an assassination attempt on Simonyan and Sobchak in July 2023. The agency's employees, together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Investigative Committee, detained neo-Nazis from the "Paragraph 88" group in Moscow and the Ryazan region. It was established that they prepared for the assassinations on the instructions and under the guidance of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). The accused confirmed this during interrogation. For each murder, they were promised a reward of 1.5 million rubles.
The group was engaged in attacks on people of "non-Slavic appearance." Then, one of its members, Mikhail Balashov, was contacted by a representative of the SBU and offered to set fire to relay cabinets on Russian territory, and later to commit a contract killing of Simonyan and Sobchak.
On July 3 of this year, three new defendants appeared in the criminal case on the preparation of an assassination attempt on the RT editor-in-chief and TV presenter, including an eighth-grade student. Three young people - a communications college student, an installer, and a schoolboy - were detained in connection with the hooliganism case on May 7. They were given a preventive measure in the form of a ban on certain actions. Investigators believe that the detainees are connected with the neo-Nazi group "Paragraph 88".