The Supreme Court of Law of the Republic of Latvia has restarted criminal proceedings against some woman who attempted to flee the law by faking her funeral and pretending to be dead for years, as reported by Latvijas Avīze.
In 2015 then 27 years old Jeļena was in big trouble, because the police had commenced two criminal proceedings against her.
She was accused of acquisition, storage or use of narcotic or psychotropic substances. She was also accused together with her then husband Artūrs. The second case deals with narcotic substances as well, only the charges are more serious because it is about selling aforementioned substances.
Both criminal cases were submitted to Riga City Court in the second half of 2016.
The criminal procedure in which Jeļena was the accused alongside her husband, the two of them, as then unknown individuals, had illegally purchased from an unidentified person almost 22 grams of a substance containing methamphetamine, which, according to the opinion of the expert, contained 9.4676 grams of the psychotropic substance methamphetamine.
The two brought the methamphetamine home. In the evening of the same they they contacted a potential buyer. The person on the other end was a person participating in a special police experiment. The buyer bought one dose for EUR 30. The remaining amount was found and confiscated by the police in the home of the two accused. Both suspects were detained. During the search police also found 1.97 grams of amphetamine-containing substances in the apartment of the two suspects.
The verdict was announced on the 18th of September 2017, but only for Artūrs. This is because a month prior the judge had received official information about the other accused – Jeļena – having died in August 2017. A death certificate was issued. Artūrs admitted his guilt, and so the case was viewed without checking the evidence.
Artūrs was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison.
This was not the only criminal case the man was involved in. 2009, 2015 and 2016 was on trial for crimes related to narcotic substances. In the end he was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Both criminal procedures involving Jeļena as the suspect were terminated on account of her being declared dead.
Last week, however, prosecutor Māris Garjānis received information regarding a criminal procedure launched by the State Police on the 24th of May 2023 against a group of people who hid Jeļena’s identity to help her avoid criminal liability. The group had forged the woman’s death certificate.
The false information about her death was also registered in the Single Information System.
Jeļena was caught by authorities in May 2023. She is currently a suspect in the criminal case and she remains under arrest.
The Supreme Court decided that the two previously terminated criminal cases against her are to be restored. Now Jeļena has three criminal cases to worry about.
The hearing of the Supreme Court was attended by the woman’s parents – her mother and stepfather. According to Jeļena’s mother, her daughter is very sick. Parents also said they knew nothing about their daughter being considered dead these last several years. One thing they find confusing, however, is how their daughter went to see doctors with someone else’s passport. When they asked her, she told them she would one day explain it to them.
The police caught her by accident. According to her parents, in spring this year Jeļena and her friend at the time did something wrong in Riga and were detained by municipal police. It is possible one police officer took notice of the fact that her face is rather different than the one in the passport.
Finger print analysis revealed that her palm and finger prints correspond to the data contained in the archive of the Biometric Data Processing System in two criminal proceedings that were terminated due to the death of the person.
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