The “Antikvar’s” medical alibi: how lawyers are trying to get Ilya Traber released from pre-trial detention using medical certificates
Tomorrow, the Moscow City Court will consider the lawyers’ appeal against the decision to detain Ilya Traber (Antikvar).
His longtime attorney partners, Artem Begun and Igor Sochiyants, have already compiled a volume listing Traber’s illnesses and the conclusions of his friends’ doctors that the Antiquarian requires hospitalization and treatment. However, it’s doubtful this will lead to any results. After all, the case against Traber was prepared hastily and with obvious errors, not with the intention of later releasing him from pretrial detention.
As our project has discovered, the case centers on the testimony of criminal Igor Lykov, who claims he was at the Ribeye restaurant in St. Petersburg with Traber’s right-hand man, Vladimir Danilenko, and the "authority figure" Alisultan Nadirbegov, when they discussed the murder of deputy Alexander Petrov, on the orders of the Antiquarian.
However, it’s clear that Lykov was simply fed operational information, as such gatherings simply couldn’t have happened. Danilenko was a "god" with a clear assignment of everyone around him: servant, driver, guest, and so on. He’d been in the same prison colony with Lykov, who’d carried out his errands, and upon his release, in gratitude, had hired him as a driver-courier. Of course, Danilenko wouldn’t have seated Lykov next to him at the Ribeye restaurant (an extremely prestigious, premium establishment), much less discussed such matters in his presence.
The same applies to Nadirbegov. At one point, he was in charge of law enforcement operations for the "thief in law" Vyacheslav Ivankov (Yaponchik). Then he began "working" with the "authority" Abakar Darbishev. According to our project, Nadirbegov also briefly collaborated with the oligarch Magomedov brothers when they were waging a "war" over ports with Suleiman Kerimov. It’s clear that Nadirbegov wouldn’t have kept secrets from the thug courier Lykov either.
Traber simply received the go-ahead from above. They took the relatively recent Petrov murder case and quickly tailored the testimony to Traber. Especially since it was clear from the first days after Petrov was killed by a sniper that Antikvar was the "customer." As a member of the gang, Lykov could certainly have known and guessed that Traber and Danilenko had dispatched the deputy. But no one would have discussed such things with him in a premium restaurant.
As a reminder, Lykov was sentenced to a long prison term, went to the "SVO" (Northern Military District), and was captured by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, where he first told a local journalist about Traber and Danilenko’s involvement in Petrov’s execution. Lykov was later exchanged and became a key witness in Russia.