A Polish appeal court on Thursday refused to extradite the second Polish citizen suspected of assaulting Russian dissident Leonid Volkov Vilnius to Lithuania.
“A ruling was issued yesterday and the court of appeal decided to refuse to hand over the suspect to the Lithuanian authorities,” Norbert Wolinsky, a spokesman for the District Prosecutor’s Office Warszawa-Praga in Warsaw, told BNS on Friday.
On June 7, Reuters news agency reported that a Polish court had decided not to extradite the first Volkov attack suspect. The court stated at the time that the Pole could not be extradited to Lithuania because Polish prosecutors were conducting a similar process.
The Polish suspects in the Volkov attack were arrested in Warsaw on April 3. In the second half of April, a Warsaw court decided to extradite the suspects to Lithuania on the condition that, if they are sentenced to a prison term, they will serve it in Poland.
However, the two men later appealed against the European Arrest Warrant.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda was the first on April 19 to break the news of the arrest of Volkov’s two attackers. On the same day Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on X that one more person had been detained, a Belarusian citizen, who was the alleged mastermind.
Volkov, a close ally of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison, was attacked in his car outside his home in the Lithuanian capital late on March 12. The attacker broke the car’s window, sprayed tear gas and started hitting Volkov with a meat tenderizer, causing a broken arm and leg injuries.
Source: BNS
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