5.  The applicants were born in 1971 and 1976 and are detained in Lipcani.
6.  In July 1999 the German police found the corpse of a Moldovan national in a river near Hamburg. The investigation led to a Moldovan national, A.B., who had shared a house with the victim. During questioning by the German police, A.B., who was a suspect, declared that the murder had been committed by the applicants who had beaten up the victim and strangled him. A.B. stated that he had only helped them to carry the victim’s dead body and that he had not seen the body being thrown into the river. He knew, however, that a concrete pole had been attached to the victim’s body before it immersion. The goal of the murder was allegedly to obtain the victim’s five thousand German marks, which he had deposited with a German family. According to A.B., after the murder, the applicants manipulated the German family into believing that the victim had been arrested by police in another part of Germany and that he needed the money. After obtaining the money, one of the applicants wired it to his family in Moldova.
7.  During the court proceedings in Moldova, the competent court resorted to international legal assistance by summoning at least seven witnesses who lived in Germany, including A.B. All witnesses were summoned once through the intermediary of the Moldovan Ministry of Justice and the German authorities. However, none of them appeared before the Moldovan court and no reasons for failure to appear were given. The attempts to summon the witness were not repeated.
8.  On 29 December 2008 the Botanica District Court acquitted the applicants of murder charges that had been brought against them. The court found that the only piece of evidence presented by the prosecutor in support of the accusation against the applicants was the statements made by A.B. to the German police. Since A.B. himself had been accused by the German police of the victim’s murder at the time of his questioning, he had a personal interest in accusing other persons. Moreover, his statements were not totally coherent and consistent. In particular, he had stated to the German police that he had not been present when the victim’s body had been thrown into the river. However, somehow he knew that a concrete pole had been attached to the corpse. Lastly, the Moldovan authorities had been unable to bring A.B. to Moldova, and the applicants had not been present during the interview with the German police and had therefore been unable to put questions to A.B. For all the above reasons the evidence was excluded from the file. However, the applicants were found guilty of fraud as a result of the fact that they had manipulated the German family with whom the victim’s money had been deposited, and had appropriated the money.
9.  On 25 February 2010 the Chişinău Court of Appeal allowed an appeal by the prosecutor and reversed the judgment of the lower court in so far as it concerned the murder charges. The court admitted A.B.’s statements given before the German police in evidence and found the applicants guilty of murder. The court found A.B.’s statements to be reliable because they had been made before an investigating judge. The applicants were sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. At the same time, the applicants were cleared of the charge of fraud on account of the Statute of Limitations.
10.  The applicants lodged an appeal on points of law before the Supreme Court of Justice in which they argued, inter alia, that the statements made by A.B. before the German authorities and read out during the hearing before the Court of Appeal could not be admitted in evidence unless they had had the opportunity to confront A.B. in a court hearing and address questions to him. Moreover, the applicants submitted that A.B. had a personal interest in accusing them because he was a suspect himself.
11.  On 18 January 2011 the Supreme Court of Justice dismissed the applicants’ appeal and upheld the judgment of the Court of Appeal. The Supreme Court held that the fact that the applicants had not been present during A.B.’s questioning by the German authorities had been as a result of their own actions, because they had left Germany by that time. Two of the sitting judges (S.M. and V.T.) wrote a dissenting opinion in which they expressed the view that the applicants’ rights as guaranteed by Article 6 § 1 of the Convention had been breached by the fact that they had been unable to examine the only prosecution witness, A.B., on whose evidence their convictions had been based.