MOSCOW, February 11 - RAPSI. Murad Musayev, the lawyer of the man who has been charged with killing retired colonel Yury Budanov, has denied the rumor that witness Ruslan Sataliyev was bribed. He told RIA Novosti that they only paid for the witness's ticket to Moscow.

The media earlier quoted a police source, claiming a second witness had said that the defendant's lawyers tried to bribe him. Musayev said that Ruslan Sataliyev had been kidnapped and beaten up after testifying in the Moscow City Court. He claimed that police officers who wanted the man to testify against the defendant were responsible for this.

"It is a logical sequence of events in this criminal case: first they kidnap the witness, then they claim to have new testimony," Musayev said. "Of course I did not bribe him. I only transferred money to his credit card so that he could buy a ticket to Moscow for the court hearing," the lawyer said.

He explained that the witness lives in a village several kilometers from Volgograd. "I don't know if he has an income, but it is clear he cannot afford a ticket to Moscow, and so we gave him 15,000 rubles ($497) to cover his travel expenses," Musayev said.

The defense lawyer claims that the kidnappers wanted Sataliyev to say that he had been given 100,000 rubles ($3,315), the same sum that was paid to the previous witness, Alexander Yevtukhov, but the man refused to say so because he had received only 15,000 rubles.

Yuri Budanov was sentenced by a Russian court to 10 years in prison for kidnapping and murdering Elza Kungayeva, an 18-year-old Chechen girl who Budanov claimed to be a sniper for Chechen rebels. After eight years in prison, he was released on parole in January 2009. He was killed in Moscow on June 10, 2011.