Court: 14 fined in connection with Moscow riots
MOSCOW. Oct 14 (Interfax) - A district court said on Monday that 14 of those involved in Sunday's riots in Moscow's Biryulyovo Zapadnoye district had been fined between 500 and 3,000 rubles and that six others faced similar fines.
Six individuals were fined 3,000 rubles each on charges of "violation of the regulations on the organization or conduct of an assembly," Chertanovsky Court spokeswoman Olga Rozhkova told Interfax.
Three were fined 1,000 rubles each for "petty hooliganism," and four others 500 rubles each on the same charge.
One person was fined 1,000 rubles on the charge of disobedience to the police.
Six people were still awaiting their sentences, some of them having been charged with "violation of the regulations on the organization or conduct of an assembly" and the others with "petty hooliganism," Rozhkova said.
The riots were triggered by the killing of Yegor Shcherbakov, a local 25-year-old man, on Wednesday night. Investigators say the young man and his girlfriend were returning home when an unfamiliar man approached them at the door of their apartment house and stabbed Shcherbakov after a verbal exchange.
The young man died immediately and the suspect fled the scene.
Based on recordings of security cameras some media reported that the murderer may have come from Central Asia or the Caucasus.
Some 40 people gathered outside of the Biryulyovo Zapadnoye police precinct on Saturday evening demanding the identification and detention of Shcherbakov's murderer. They also called for tightening migration laws and closing the nearby vegetable warehouse where they thought the murderer was hiding. After deputy police chief of the Moscow Southern Administrative District addressed them, they dispersed.
A "popular assembly" was organized in the area on Sunday afternoon demanding that the murderer be found. The assembly evolved into a riot and clashes with the police, with several officers being injured. About 400 hundred people were detained, more than 70 of them receiving summonses to court and the rest being given admonitory interviews.