MOSCOW, December 11 (Itar-Tass) – A district court in Moscow begins the hearings of a criminal case over the kidnapping of the son of Director General of the Kaspersky Lab antivirus and security soft producer company, Eugene Kaspersky.
Eugene’s son Ivan was kidnapped in the morning of April 19, 2011, at the moment when he was walking up to the office building where he worked. The kidnappers handcuffed and blindfolded him and forced him into a car that had been stolen.
They later put the young man into a different car and drove him to a dacha near the town of Sergiyev-Possad. There he was kept in a sauna outbuilding for five days while the kidnappers demanded a ransom of 3 million euro for him.
April 24, the law enforcement agencies tracked down the place where Ivan Kaspersky was kept and freed him.
On the same day, police operatives detained the kidnappers on the way to Moscow where they were going to hand a digital carrier with the information on Ivan’s condition over to his parents.
Four residents of Moscow – Semyon Gromov, 30, Oleg Mayukov, 31, Nikolai Savelyev Sr., and Nikolai Savelyev Jr., 31, are accused of kidnapping a person by a group of people upon prior conspiracy out of venal motives and committing a gross extortion of money with the use of violence.
According to the evidence gathered by the court, the individuals involved in the case and a 30-year-old officer of a secret service, decided to kidnap Ivan Kaspersky for extorting a ransom for his liberation.
They spent some time gathering information on the young man, including data from the Internet.
Semyon Gromov and Georgy Mayukov grabbed Ivan on the street, while the Savelyevs’ father and son provided their dacha for keeping him.
A garrison military court sentenced Alexei Ustimchuk to 4.5 years in a high security jail. The sentence was issued August 30, 2012.