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Lawyer Likens Self to Magnitsky in YouTube Appeal From Jail

A lawyer sentenced to 12 years in prison has recorded a YouTube video?  appeal to President Dmitry Medvedev in which he compares his situation to that of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in custody in November.

Prison authorities said Friday that they intend to investigate how the video was recorded and posted on the Internet, Interfax reported.

The lawyer, Valery Kulish, 33, claims that he refused to support a 6 million euro ($8.1 million) scam organized by his former employer, Alexei Dushutin, head of Voyenno-Stroitelnoye Upravleniye Moskvy, a state-controlled company.

Dushutin then paid 150,000 euros ($200,000) to fabricate a case against Kulish, the lawyer says. Moscow's Tushinsky District Court convicted Kulish on charges of economic crimes in late March.

Representatives of the Federal Prison Service said Kulish, who is being held in a pretrial detention center in Moscow, had broken the rules that require all messages by inmates to be screened by the prison service.

The prison service promised to investigate how the appeal was filmed and published.

The appeal comes after Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer for the Hermitage Capital investment fund, died in a Moscow pretrial detention center where he was being held on tax-fraud charges that he called a sham by corrupt Interior Ministry officials.

Medvedev has ordered an investigation into Magnitsky's death, which led to a shakeup of the prison service. The Kremlin has made no public comment about Kulish's appeal.

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