After being in remand detention for nine months, the activist of the Party “Dignity and Truth Platform” Gheorghe Petic was set free after the judges of the Chisinau City Appeals Court sent the case against him back for retrial in the evening of July 19. The decision was also taken after the judges questioned the woman who asserts that she was raped by Gheorghe Petic, IPN reports.

Angela Istrate, one of the lawyers for Gheorghe Petic, on a social networking site wrote that the Chisinau City Appeals Court remitted the case back to the ordinary court for being retried by other judges. Gheorghe Petic was banned from leaving Moldova for two months.

On March 20, the former border police officer Gheorghe Petic was sentenced by the common law court to three years and six months in jail and fined 30,000 lei. He was arrested in the middle of last October on charges of rape. The man pleads not guilty and says that the case started against him is political in character.

Gheorghe Petic ran in the February 24 parliamentary elections on the list of the Electoral Bloc ACUM DA and PAS, but could not take part in the election campaign and didn’t enter Parliament.