MOSCOW, March 19 (Itar-Tass) – Bolshoi Theatre /GABT/ director general Anatoly Iksanov said Pavel Dmitrichenko, suspected of masterminding the attack on GABT ballet art director Sergei Filin, will remain on staff until the court ruling.
"Dmitrichenko remains a GABT employee until the end of the trial. After the trial, his fate as an artist will be determined," Iksanov said told a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday.
Earlier, Moscow criminal police said they were confident that Pavel Dmitrichenko and two other suspects were involved in the attack on Filin.
"We are certain that the persons detained in the case over attack on Filin, are complicit in the crime. We have not found a single mismatch in the information they supplied as we were solving the crime," deputy chief of the city criminal police department Maxim Vanichkin said.
Filin, who is convalescing abroad, said he was not in conflict with /GABT leading soloist/ Pavel Dmitrichenko and that he felt "no enmity toward him."
The 42-year-old ballet art director was attacked near his house Troitskaya Street in Moscow late in the evening of January 17. An unidentified man splashed acid in his face and fled the scene. Filin was hospitalized with serious face and eye burns. Pavel Dmitrichenko is the suspected mastermind.
Iksanov made it clear that Dmitrichenko would not be fired if the court did not prove his culpability. Bolshoi Theatre employees said in an open letter that Dmitrichenko could not have masterminded the crime.
Moscow's Taganka court sanctioned the arrest of three suspects till April 18. Dmitrichenko's suspected accomplices are Andrei Lipatov and Yuri Zarutsky, a man with a criminal record, who confessed to splashing acid in Filin's face.
Filin officially denied the allegations that he did not plan to return to Russia. His colleagues are expecting him to resume work at the GABT in the summer.