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March 6th, 2013 
David Schulberg the 3rd
Posted
Russian police say a leading Bolshoi Ballet soloist and two other detained suspects have confessed to their involvement in the acid attack on the dance company’s artistic director.
Sergei Filin, 42, was struck with sulphuric acid by a masked assailant as he was entering his apartment building through a dark parking lot in January.
He spent about two weeks in a Moscow hospital getting treatment for burns to his face and having a series of surgeries on his eyes.
He has since been moved to Germany for further treatment that may take months. His sight was last reported to have been partially recovered in one eye.
Police in Moscow say one of the company’s leading male dancers, Pavel Dmitrichenko, has signed a written confession along with the other suspects who were arrested on Tuesday.
The investigators did not disclose the nature of the confessions, but said Dmitrichenko was the mastermind of the attack.
Police say his accomplice, Yury Zarutsky, was the assailant who flung acid into Filin’s face and Andrei Lipatov was the driver at the scene.
“At the current time all three have signed confessions and have been placed under arrest,” the police said.
“The necessary investigative work is being undertaken to establish all the circumstances of the crime.”
The attack on Filin blew apart the refined veneer of the Bolshoi Ballet, exposing bitter infighting and long-held grudges between its managers and dancers.
Dmitrichenko is not one of the half dozen very top male dancers at the company known as premiers, but he is a leading soloist, a rank just one level down.
He won some prominence this year by taking the title role in the revival of Yuri Grigorovich’s Soviet-era ballet Ivan The Terrible to music by Prokofiev about the brutal mediaeval ruler’s iron grip over Russia.
According to the Bolshoi website, he was due to dance on March 16 in Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty in the role of the Blue Bird.
Russian media have also pointed to a link with his girlfriend Anzhelina Vorontsova, a young ballerina at the theatre, who had been involved in conflicts with Filin over the allocation of roles.
AFP
Topics:
law-crime-and-justice,
crime,
dance,
arts-and-entertainment,
russian-federation
Source Article from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-06/dancers-confess-to-bolshoi-acid-attack/4556774
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