17 March 2003 he was summoned to the military prosecutor's office of the city of Khankaly as a witness. The accused were charged with a murder, robbery, willful destruction of someone else's property and abuse of the officer. The accused pleaded not guilty of the murder and in June 2004 they were acquitted by North-Caucasian district military tribunal. Later the Military collegium of the Russian Federation's Supreme Court repealed the guilty verdict and the case was submitted to a new trial. The second trial In October 2005 Arakcheev and Khudyakov were acquitted again by the jury. During the second trial some of the associates of the accused retracted their testimony. The soldier Ermolyaev explained to the jury that his previous testimony had been given under duress: "I was beaten many times, called to the interrogation at night, and the interrogator threatened to put me behind bars with Chechen fighters". Ramsan Kadyrov, the future President of Chechnya and a former Chechen rebel, commented on this acquittal saying that "the initial cause of the acquittal was the jury’s failure to fully understand the will of my [Chechen] people in this criminal case". But that time prosecutors did not find any procedural infractions in the course of the trial. Then-president of Chechnya Alu Alkhanov made a request to the constitutional court of Russia, which determined that the jury was to be formed according to the territorial principle, that is, from subjects of the Federation in which the crime was committed. As there is no jury trial in Chechnya, the military men were to be judged by competent judges. On 25 April 2006, on the basis of this order of the constitutional court, the Supreme Court recalled the second acquittal, having submitted the case to the North-Caucasian district military tribunal again for re-trial by another composition of the court. In this case "another composition of the court" meant a single judge. The third trial On 19 December 2006, the preliminary hearing took place in the North-Caucasian district's military tribunal and resulted in the change of the measure of restraint for Arakcheev and Khudyakov, and on 20 December the officers were arrested in the courtroom and sent to the Rostov pretrial detention center. The aggrieved party in its motion for detention of Arakcheev and Khudyakov stressed the fact that during the second trial the accused influenced the witnesses. But the higher authorities (the Supreme Court