Ex-Yukos official gets life in retrial

A Moscow court on Monday convicted the former top security officer with the dismantled Yukos oil company in the deaths of three people, sentencing him to life in prison in a retrial.

The Moscow City Court ruled that Alexei Pichugin was guilty of organizing three murders and four attempted murders, court spokeswoman Anna Usacheva said. Pichugin was sentenced last year to 24 years in prison on the same charges, but prosecutors appealed for a life sentence and Russia's highest court ordered a retrial.

The new conviction is expected to lend momentum to prosecutors' efforts to try Leonid Nevzlin, a Russian businessman linked to Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Nevzlin now lives in self-imposed exile in Israel.

Pichugin, the former head of Yukos security service, has insisted he is innocent.

"The sentence is not just. All the evidence has been turned on its head," defense lawyer Georgy Kaganer said in televised comments.

Pichugin's arrest in 2003 had marked the launch of the government's politically charged campaign against Yukos and Khodorkovsky _ once Russia's richest man.

The crackdown that led to Yukos' partial nationalization and an eight-year prison sentence for Khodorkovsky was widely seen as a Kremlin drive to silence an opponent and strengthen control of the oil sector.

During two previous trials, Pichugin was found guilty of organizing the killing in 2002 of a businessman from the southern city of Tambov and his wife, as well the 1998 killings of a businesswoman and the mayor of the oil-town of Nefteyugansk. He was also convicted of organizing attacks another businessman and plotting to kill a former Yukos employee.

Kamil Kashaev, an official with the Prosecutor General's office, said Pichugin's conviction would help prosecutors bring new charges against Nevzlin and demand his extradition from Israel.