Krasnodar taxi driver spends eight years seeking a review of his drug case

Convicted over someone else's backpack

Anton Koryukin, a taxi driver from Krasnodar, has spent eight years trying to prove his innocence in a drug case involving drugs found in his passenger's backpack. The man's father, Valery Koryukin, told Gazeta.Ru about this. According to him, in 2018 his son was driving three passengers to Sochi when the car was stopped at the Magri traffic police post. One of the passengers, Okonechnikov, was found with two packets of drugs; he said they were for personal use. The other passengers were told to collect their belongings from the car, and an 'unclaimed' backpack remained in the trunk, containing more packets with drug stashes. 'Everyone said it wasn't theirs, and to my son they said:

The verdict and the confession

In 2022, on the third attempt, the court sentenced Koryukin to 10 years and six months in a strict-regime penal colony. A few months later, the passenger Okonechnikov filed a confession and admitted that the drugs belonged to him. According to the publication, his words were confirmed by a forensic examination: the man's traces were found both on the backpack and on a toothbrush inside it. Despite this, according to Valery Koryukin, investigators refused to open a case against Okonechnikov, finding no corpus delicti. 'A single fingerprint at a crime scene is enough to charge a person, but here they are all over everything, and no one sees anything in this,' Gazeta.Ru quotes the taxi driver's father. Asking for attention to the situation, he turned to human rights commissioner Yana Lantratova, as well as to the Federation Council and the State Duma.

What is known and what remains unclear

Editorial comment: the key conflict in the case is the contradiction between the passenger's confession and the examination results, on the one hand, and the investigators' refusal to open a case, on the other. The facts presented come from the convicted man's father and a Gazeta.Ru publication; the position of the investigators and the court is not detailed in the available materials. It is unknown whether motions to review the verdict are currently being considered, or how the authorities the family approached have responded.