MOSCOW, Aug. 22 The Lublin Court of Moscow has sentenced exterminator Anton Kotov to five years in prison in the case of fatal watermelon poisoning, the court reported.
«Kotov was sentenced to imprisonment for a term of five years to be served in a penal colony,» the source said.
In addition, six million rubles were recovered from him in favor of the two victims.
The hearings were held behind closed doors at the request of the relatives of the victims, so the details are unknown. The defendant was taken into custody in the courtroom.
As the investigation established, on September 6, 2021, Kotov treated the Magnit store on Sovkhoznaya Street in Moscow with the drug Cigatrin from insects. According to the prosecutor's office, in order to reduce the volume of work, he, in violation of the contract, demanded that the store employees leave the premises and processed the trading floor along with products, including watermelons without packaging.
On September 10, members of one family who bought a watermelon were hospitalized in «Magnit» on September 7th. Mother survived, grandmother and granddaughter died. The prosecutor's office reported that the cause of death was «chemical trauma».
Dmitry Kutyev, general director of the Regional Disinfection Center, said that his employee Kotov acted according to instructions and «didn't break anything at all.» According to Kutyev, it is impossible to get poisoned with the Cigatrin insecticide in the dosage that was used in Magnit so much.
The defense reported that Kotov does not consider himself guilty and, according to the examination, «no traces of cygathrin were found in the internal organs of the dead, as well as on the surfaces of fruits.» At first he was arrested, but then the measure of restraint was changed to a ban on certain actions.
Kotov was found guilty under the article «Providing unsafe services that negligently caused the death of two or more persons,» which could lead to up to ten years in prison.