It was reported on Tuesday that a high-profile criminal case over the attempt on the life of Ballet Artistic Director of the Bolshoi Theatre Sergei Filin is solved. The criminal attack on Filin was committed on January 18. The search operatives detained three suspects, including a suspected contractor of the crime – solo ballet dancer of the Bolshoi Theatre Pavel Dmitrichenko. According to the version of the detectives, he contracted the criminal attack on the artistic director to his acquainted criminal, who splashed the acid in the face of Filin.
The Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily recalled that Sergei Filin fell victim of the criminals in the evening on January 17 right at the doorsteps of his house. When the choreographer parked his car at the parking and was already going to go to the entrance of his residential house, someone called him by name. When Sergei turned back, the unidentified man splashed the acid in his face. The newspaper noted that the ballet choreographer received numerous threats before, cut the tyres of his car were cut, the email and his homepage in a social network was hacked. On the next day on January 18 the criminal case was opened for a deliberate heavy damage to the health. The detectives are investigating Filin’s professional activities as the main version of the crime.
The operatives succeeded to find the range of suspects thanks to the information that Filin gave to them, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily noted. The criminals were detected thanks to the billing communications system. “The operatives traced down all mobile subscribers, who were speaking on January 17 in the courtyard of the residential house, where Sergei Filin was attacked,” a source in the law enforcement agencies said. A caller was speaking with a certain number of people, who were the actors of the Bolshoi Theatre,” the source said.
The detectives found that Pavel Dmitrichenko probably had some reasons for a conflict with Sergei Filin, the Kommersant daily reported. “A woman, as it usually happens, turned out be the reason for the conflict between them,” a source of the newspaper said. She is a talented star ballerina of the Bolshoi Theatre Anzhelina Vorontsova, who is in close relations with Pavel Dmitrichenko.
According to the version of the detectives, the relations between Vorontsova and Filin became tense back in 2008, when the young ballerina won in the prestigious contest Arabesque. The then director of the ballet company at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre Sergei Filin invited her to work at the theatre, but she chose the job at the Bolshoi Theatre. When Filin became the ballet artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre, the situation has just deteriorated, because the ballerina turned out to be a disciple of his rival – Bolshoi star ballet dancer Nikolai Tsiskaridze. In his view, Sergei Filin deliberately encroached on the rights of Tsiskaridze’s talented disciple, not giving the leading parts to her, and he informed the detectives about this at the interrogation. Witness Tsiskaridze noted that Filin allegedly invited ballet dancer Vorontsova and offered to her a part in the Swan Lake ballet, in exchange for the proposal that she leaves her ballet tutor, but the latter refused from this proposal. The detectives believe that at some moment Pavel Dmitrichenko could have made up his mind to take revenge on Filin for the insults inflicted on Vorontsova, in his view.
The Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily reported that Pavel Dmitrichenko is the leading actor of the ballet company in the Bolshoi Theatre and plays in many performances. The leading part of Ivan the Terrible in the ballet of the same name staged by Yuri Grigorovich to the music of Prokofyev and a slave in the Bayadere ballet are among his parts. Dmitrichenko also played Hans in Gisele and Jose in the Carmen Suite. He is a member of the Bolshoi ballet company since 2002. In 2004 the ballet dancer became an award winner of the International Ballet Contest in Rome and received the speciality of pedagogue-choreographer in 2005.