By SABRINA TAVERNISE, The New York Times

MOSCOW, June 19 — Anatoly Bykov, one of Russia's most infamous mobsters, who has been sought for years by the authorities here, was sentenced to jail by a Moscow court today — and then promptly set free.

It appeared to be an ignominious end, or at least pause, in an organized-crime case that some call a litmus test of Russia's criminal justice system, and others have called a travesty of that same system.

Which was right was not clear, even after Mr. Bykov, a lanky, squinty-eyed former boxer, strode from a Moscow courthouse into a waiting car early this evening, apparently a free man.

The story's odd ending has a stranger beginning. Mr. Bykov, 42, who is from the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk and cornered its lucrative aluminum business in the 1990's, was on trial for the murder of a fellow mobster in an exclusive Moscow neighborhood in 2000.

But the killing never happened. Although the Moscow police announced that they had discovered the bodies of two of Mr. Bykov's associates, and although television repeatedly aired a news item that included shots of a body bag, the dead men showed up very much alive a few weeks later.

That was after Mr. Bykov had been arrested and charged. The authorities, desperate to prosecute him, amended the charge to conspiracy to commit murder.

It did not take a Russian conspiracy theorist to spot something fishy.

"It was a spectacle," Genrikh Padva, Mr. Bykov's lawyer, said after the trial. "No one was even killed. They made it all up in a special lie to be able to accuse Bykov."

Today, after finding Mr. Bykov guilty of the conspiracy charge, the court set him free on five years' probation. The prosecutor's office pronounced itself satisfied with the sentence, but many saw it as a blow to President Vladimir Putin's cleanup campaign to rein in wayward regional barons.

"There's enough to put him in jail for years, but as with Al Capone, they just couldn't prove anything," said Aleksandr Karpov, owner of a television station in Krasnoyarsk.

The authorities had filed criminal case after criminal case, but nothing stuck. They took heart when a witness came forward swearing that Mr. Bykov had ordered him to do the killing in this case. But just before the trial, he withdrew his testimony.

Now, after 20 months of arrest, custody and trial, the state seems to have given up. Mr. Bykov, who throughout the trial managed to hang on to his position as a deputy in Krasnoyarsk's regional Parliament, is set to fly back to the region tonight in time for work tomorrow morning.

In many ways, it is still his region. Mr. Bykov, who grew rich on his aluminum plant, financed an orphanage and workers' vacations, while ducking taxes. "He's very popular — a kind of Robin Hood figure," Mr. Karpov said.

Mr. Bykov's release is probably most distressing for Oleg Deripaska, head of Russia's biggest aluminum conglomerate and a bitter opponent of Mr. Bykov.

Now Mr. Deripaska will have other worries, said Yulia Latynina, a novelist and journalist who has written extensively about Mr. Bykov, whom she describes as "the godfather of Krasnoyarsk." "His expenses for personal security guards will go up," Ms. Latynina said wryly.