In December 2006, the Lithuanian prosecutors issued a European Arrest Warrant for Latvian citizen Konstantin Nikulin, a suspect in the Medininkai killings. He was arrested by Latvian police on 28 November 2007. Nikulin had already been tried and received a suspended sentence of 2.5 years in 2004 for his involvement in the January 1991 events in Latvia. After the trial, Nikulin became a key witness to an unrelated murder and changed his surname to Konstantin Mikhailov (Konstantinas Michailovas) as part of a witness protection program. On 28 January 2008, the Supreme Court of Latvia decided to extradite Mikhailov to Lithuania, and he was jailed in the Lukiškės Prison awaiting trial. The case has some 220 witnesses and volumes of written material. The statute of limitations for murder is 20 years; thus the expiration date would be July 2011. On 11 May 2011, Mikhailov was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Mikhailov appealed against the decision claiming innocence while Lithuanian prosecutors appealed against the decision hoping to convict Mikhailov of crimes against humanity. On 6 June 2016, the Appeals Court upheld the life imprisonment sentence and reclassified the crime from murder to "acts against people prohibited by international law" (Article 100 of the Criminal Code of Lithuania). Mikhailov appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of Lithuania which started its proceedings on 11 January 2017. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction on 28 February, but Mikhailov submitted an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.