The Main Directorate of the Investigative Committee charged two members of the ultra-right Paragraph 88 gang, whom the FSB called participants in the prevented assassination attempt on Margarita Simonyan and Ksenia Sobchak. The decision of September 6 is at the disposal of Mediazona.
Eight teenagers from «Paragraph 88». What do we know about the detainees in the case of the attempt on Simonyan and Sobchak
We are talking about 22-year-old Yegor Savelyev and 18-year-old Mikhail Balashov, whom the FSB considers the leader of Paragraph 88. They are accused of three attackson migrants in the Bitsevsky Forest in the spring of 2023, in preparation for the murder of Simonyanand in storage weapons with ammunition.
On July 15, the Federal Security Service reported on the detention of Savelyev, Balashov and six other teenagers — ultra-right schoolchildren and recent graduates. Although then it was said about the prevention of the assassination attempt on Simonyan and Sobchak, ordered by the Ukrainian special services, all eight were sent to SIZO on another charge related to attacks on migrants. An eyewitness told Mediazona that after their detention, the security forces beat them and tortured them with electric shocks in order to obtain confessions.
The case file mentions a ninth alleged member of the gang named Ryazantsev. The publication Kompromat1.press claimed that his name was Pavel and that he was 14 years old. It is not known what status and under what preventive measure he is in.
The Investigative Committee opened the case of the attempt on Simonyan only a month later. At the moment, of the eight arrested, only Savelyev and Balashov are walking through it. Sobchak is not mentioned in the materials. The organizers of the alleged murder are presented there as «unidentified persons» and are characterized only by «hatred» for the citizens of Russia, «actively supporting» the war in Ukraine.
According to investigators, “unidentified persons” in June promised Balashov 50 thousand US dollars for the murder of Simonyan, and he, together with Savelyev, monitored the propagandist’s house in Moscow and her movements for several days, sending a video in a telegram. Balashov, as stated in the resolution, was detained late on the evening of July 13, when he climbed into someone else's garage on Vavilov Street to pick up an AK-74 assault rifle and cartridges for it from a cache.
The attacks blamed on Paragraph 88 participants took place on April 2, May 21 and June 20. They were filmed on camera, and the video was then posted on the paragraph88 telegram channel, which is now unavailable. Two citizens of Tajikistan and a citizen of Uzbekistan were injured. They were punched and kicked, including being sprayed with pepper spray.
Kommersant claimed that a 16-year-old acquaintance of the arrested men made an appointment with at least two victims. In the April video, the attackers demanded that the man confess that he was a pedophile, and said that he allegedly corresponded with a 14-year-old girl. The text of the accusation does not describe exactly how the attackers met the victims.