MOSCOW, August 27 (RAPSI) – The North Caucasus District Court has given a life sentence to Said Amirov, the ex-Mayor of Makhachkala, for the murder of the chief of the local Investigative Committee office and other crimes, RIA Novosti reported on Thursday from the court.

Amirov committed these crimes together with his nephew and six other people.

His nephew, Yusup Dzhaparov, was sentenced to 18 years in a high security prison and 18 months of supervised release. Magomed Akhmedov was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Two other Akhmedov brothers will spend 10 years in prison each, Murad Aliyev 12 years, Magomed Kadiyev 13 years, and Zubair Mutayev 11 years.

They were charged with the murder of Arsen Gadzhibekov, acting head of the Investigative Committee department for the Sovetsky District of Makhachkala, and with planning and implementing a terrorist attack in the Moskva mall in Kaspiysk.

The defendants denied the charges.

Gadzhibekov worked on a number of high-profile criminal cases, including the 2010 twin bombings in Kizlyar, a town on the border with Chechnya, in which 10 were killed and 270 injured. He was also investigating misconduct allegations against members of the Makhachkala city administration headed by Amirov, according to Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin.

Confident in their impunity, Amirov and his henchmen threatened and intimidated rivals and undesirable people into doing their bidding, Markin said. He added that Amirov did not believe his eyes when investigators from the central staff of the Investigative Committee arrested him.

Earlier, the court sentenced Amirov and Dzhaparov to 10 and eight and a half years in prison, respectively, for plotting a murder attempt on Sagid Murtazaliyev, head of the Pension Fund in Dagestan and a prominent Russian wrestler, whose plane was supposed to be shot down by a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile.