MOSCOW, March 24 (RAPSI) – Russia’s Supreme Court has upheld the life sentence passed on Said Amirov, the former mayor of Dagestan's capital Makhachkala, for terrorism, RAPSI learnt in the court’s press office on Thursday.

Defense lawyers asked the court to reverse the judgment but their appeal was dismissed. Thus the ruling took effect.

Concurrently, the Supreme Court reduced the sentence from 18 years to 17 years and 10 months in prison for Amirov’s nephew Yusup Dzhaparov.

Sentences handed down to other defendants were also upheld.

On August 27, 2015, the North Caucasus District Court sentenced Amirov to life in prison for terrorism. His nephew, Yusup Dzhaparov, who was a deputy mayor of Kaspiysk, was sentenced to 18 years in a high security prison and 18 months of supervised release. Six other men who had been also convicted in this case received long jail terms ranging from 10 to 22 years.

They were found guilty of organizing a 2011 terrorist attack in a shopping mall in the city of Kaspiysk and killing Arsen Gadzhibekov, the director of the Investigative Committee in one of the districts of Makhachkala.

Gadzhibekov at the time of his death worked on a number of high-profile criminal cases, including the 2010 twin bombings in Kizlyar, a town on the border with Chechnya, that left 10 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.

Moreover, in July 2014, Amirov and Dzhaparov were sentenced to 10 and 8.5 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.