Three air traffic controllers at Moscow's Vnukovo airport, where the plane of Total CEO Christophe de Margerie crashed in 2014, were sentenced Thursday to terms of five to six years in detention by a Russian court.
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Nadezhda Arkhipova, Alexander Krouglov and Roman Dunayev, who was their superior, were sentenced to five years, five and a half years and six years respectively in open prison, announced the Moscow court in Solntsvesky. Nadezhda Arkhipova was immediately released from sentence under an amnesty decreed in 2015 in honor of the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, the accident having taken place during a period covered by this measure. The amnesty concerning only those sentenced to terms of five years imprisonment or less, Alexander Krouglov and Roman Dounaïev will go into detention, according to Russian news agencies. On October 20, 2014, Total's number one was killed in the crash of his Falcon plane, which hit a snowplow on take-off, at Moscow's Vnukovo airport. The two pilots and an air hostess were also killed.
"The sentence should be quashed"
The three employees were accused of failing to react when the plow entered the runway and of failing to meet safety standards. "We do not agree with this judgment (...), we are going to appeal," Roman Dunayev's lawyer, Igor Tchernetsky, told AFP. Cited by Russian news agencies, lawyers for the other two defendants have indicated that they will also appeal. The two main defendants in this case, who had pleaded guilty, were sentenced in July 2017 to three and four years in camp. They had benefited from the amnesty and had not served their sentence. Among them was the driver of the snowplow, Vladimir Martynenko: he had 0.6 grams of alcohol per liter of blood at the time of the accident, according to the Russian Investigation Committee. The air traffic controllers denied responsibility and received support from the International Transport Workers' Federation, which called their lawsuits "shocking" .
In a statement sent to AFP after the judgment, the Russian union of air traffic controllers estimated that "the sentence should be quashed and our comrades acquitted and released" . In an open letter to the Ministry of Transport, the union assured that the defendants were simply "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and had acted "strictly in accordance with the instructions" .
