You're reading: Men falsely charged with terrorism released after two years in jail

DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine -- On March 11, a Dnipropetrovsk court released two of the four men imprisoned -- but never tried -- for organizing a series of bomb blasts in Dnipropetrovsk.

After Lev Prosvirnin and Dmytro Reva were kept in jail for 22 months, the court ruled to remove all the charges and set them free. 

Prosvirnin and Reva were charged with conspiring to organize four blasts that took place on the streets of Dnipropetrovsk on April 27, 2012, leaving 31 people injured. They were arrested on May 31, 2012 with Viktor Sukachov and Vitaliy Fedoryak.

Later they were also accused of organizing similar blasts in Kharkiv and Zaporizhya. The group became known as “Dnipropetrovsk terrorists.”

Reva and Prosvirnin never confessed their guilt. 

“I can’t even say I felt anything at the moment the court released him, because there were so many times when we hoped for release and it didn’t happen,” said Larisa Reva, 33, standing next to her husband and their 10-year old daughter Polina at the press conference in Dnipropetrovsk on March 12.

As her father spoke to the press, Polina couldn’t stop hugging him.

“She does that all the time now,” says her mother. “She became very closed after it all happened, and didn’t go to school for a year. Now she is better.”

Prosvirnin also has a small daughter, too.

For the past two years, the family has been telling the girl that her father was on a business trip, Prosvirnin’s mother Natalia Prosvirnina told Vesti newspaper in the courtroom on March 11.

Reva, 36, believes he was detained because he once worked together with the main suspect, Sukachov. They both were hired as political technologists for the PR campaign of local lawmaker Mykhailo Sokolov in 2010. 

Reva claims he was set up by one of the investigators from State Security Service who searched his apartment on the day of arrest. The man, he says, dialed Sukachov on Reva’s mobile phone, and this phone call was then counted as the proof of the connection between the two men. Supposedly, the investigator has not revealed to his supervisors that it was actually him who made the call.

Now Reva intends to go to police and demand investigation of the actions of the officer. The man, he says, is still working for State Security Service. After the guilty is found, Reva will demand the compensation for the months he spent in jail due to the false charges.

“Such things sholdn’t be forgiven. But I want to be careful with accusations, because I myself was mistakenly charged,” Reva said on March 12.

“It is wonderful that they were released, but why weren’t they released before? There were no new proofs found since fall of 2012,” says Reva’s defender Vitaliy Pogosyan.

“I think the court and the prosecutor were the hostages of the situation in our country,” said Reva.

Now that he walks free, Reva is going to take up the role of a civic activist and to defend the rights of people who were, like himself, illegally charged and prosecuted.

“I can’t say that all the people in the remand prisons are innocent, but there are indeed a lot of them there,” he said. “This is kind of what system is like in Ukraine, and it needs to be changed.”

The two remaining suspects are charged with producing and planting explosives into the trash bins in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhya and Kharkiv, and then demanding a ransom from police under the threat of more blasts. The explosions in Dnipropetrovsk were especially injurious because the explosives were planted into concrete trash bins. When the four bombs went off one after another the bins sent stone pieces flying. Two years later, there is still not a single trash bin in central Dnipropetrovsk that isn’t see-through. 

“Whatever the court decision on the two remaining suspects will be, it won’t take long. Everybody is tired of this case and everybody want it to come to an end soon,” says Reva’s defender Pogosyan.

Kyiv Post editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]