The defense lawyers of the mother of Hermitage Capital investment fund Sergei Magnitsky who died in a pre-detention center said the evidence in his death case was falsified, the fund’s press service said on Wednesday.
Magnitsky died after almost a year in a notorious Moscow pre-trial detention center in November 2009. He had been arrested on tax evasion charges just days after claiming that police investigators had stolen $230 million from the state.
“The investigation has falsified Magnitsky’s actual diagnoses in jail with a new disease, which has no medical evidence, trying to hide the intentional actions of health workers and officials of the Butyrka jail,” the press service said.
In July, a Kremlin rights council said his death was likely to have been the result of a beating and that the charges against him were fraudulent. Human rights activists and his former colleagues allege the officers he had accused were involved in his death, which was originally said to have been the result of “heart failure.”