Gold’s Gym owner and 5 others feared dead after plane crash off the coast of Costa Rica
LONDON — The former owner of a popular gymnasium in England suspected of committing the nation’s biggest ever mass murder is in jail, accused of orchestrating the crash of a Russian airliner in the South Pacific.
Sergei Magnitsky, a 33-year-old Russian, was ordered held without bail Wednesday in an airport detention center in Moscow after Russia’s chief prosecutor’s office said he was a victim of persecution.
Magnitsky, who had lived in Britain since 2004, was found hanged inside his Moscow apartment in September 2012. Police who searched the flat had found nothing to link him to the crash of a Russian passenger jet over western Russia in which 38 people died.
The London Gazette newspaper published video of Magnitsky, who had once run a clothing store but owned the Gold’s Gym in Islington, north London, on Thursday, saying the footage was taken at the request of “various sources in Russia.”
Police, who released the video, said the video appeared to show Magnitsky sitting in the gym floor during a time when gym users sometimes gathered at the gym to exercise.
In another clip, Magnitsky can be seen in an airplane steward’s uniform on a plane, which left Moscow for the remote village of Chernomorsk on the Black Sea on Nov. 1, 2012.
Investigators are trying to determine whether he knew there was something amiss with that fatal flight.
Magnitsky’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, has denied that he was involved in the crash and the accusations against him, saying Magnitsky was murdered in 2009 after he refused to turn over to prosecutors the name of a confidant who he believed was a double agent working for Russians.
Magnitsky’s wife, Anastasia, who was due to be tried in a New York court on Monday, said her husband was innocent.
“He was the victim
