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Two members of Russian nationalist group sentenced to life, another to 24 years in jail

Maxim Baklagin and Vyacheslav Isayev have been found guilty of the 2010 killing of a Moscow City Court judge, Eduard Chuvashov

MOSCOW, April 21. /TASS/. The Moscow District Court on Tuesday delivered a verdict to the members of Russia’s nationalist group BORN who are accused of dozens of crimes, including high-profile murders motivated by national hatred.

Two members of the Military Organisation of Russian Nationalists (BORN), Maxim Baklagin and Vyacheslav Isayev, have been found guilty of the 2010 killing of a Moscow City Court judge, Eduard Chuvashov.

The judge, who had been involved in neo-Nazi trials, was shot dead in downtown Moscow. The two defendants have been sentenced to life in a high-security penal colony, a TASS correspondent reported from the courtroom.

Another member of the nationalist group, Mikhail Volkov, is to spend 24 years behind bars for killing the activists of an anti-fascist movement, Rasul Khalilov and Fedor Filatov.

The lawyers of Volkov and Baklagin have announced plans to appeal the verdict.

"We have 10 days to do that, we will send the complaint to the Supreme Court and it will be considered by a panel of three judges," Sergey Subbotin, a lawyer for Baklagin, told TASS. Lawyer Denis Zatsepin also said his client Volkov incriminated himself when he confessed to two murders.

The fourth defendant Yury Tikhomirov, accused of links to organized criminal group, banditry and illicit possession of weapons, was acquitted. The jury found that there was no evidence of Tikhomirov’s guilt. In 2012, Tikhomirov was found guilty of killing anti-fascist activist Ilya Djaparidze and was sentenced to 10 years in jail.

The BORN group was set up in Moscow in mid-2008 by radical nationalists with the goal of committing murders motivated by ideological and national hatred and killing law enforcement agents in revenge for their legal activity.

The group is behind dozens of crimes, including high-profile murders. In 2011, one of its leaders, Nikita Tikhonov, was given a life sentence for killing lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasiya Baburova.