The Supreme Court of Tatarstan sentenced three people accused of railway sabotage, two of whom were minors, to prison terms of up to 17 years. The court's decision was reported by Realnoe Vremya.
The longest sentence — 17 years in prison — was received by 20-year-old Bulat Ibragimov. Judging by the case file, he was charged with two counts of involving a minor in a crime (Part 4 of Article 150 of the Criminal Code) and organizing sabotage activities (Part 4 of Article 281.1 of the Criminal Code). Ibragimov must spend the first three years of his sentence in prison, the rest in a maximum security colony.
Two minors involved in the case received five years in an educational colony. They were found guilty of sabotage (clause “b” of Part 2 of Article 281 of the Criminal Code). One teenager is 16 years old, the second is 17.
According to the investigation, in March 2023, three teenagers aged 14, 15 and 16 years old, on instructions from Ibragimov, set fire to a relay cabinet on the railway tracks in the Tukaevsky district of Tatarstan and filmed the fire on their phone. Ibragimov acted on the instructions of an anonymous “customer” and received nine thousand rubles for this, the investigation claims. For the arson, he paid the teenagers a thousand each, and kept six for himself.
Two days after the arson, investigators believe, Ibragimov sent the youngest of the teenagers to set fire to the Tele2 base station in the village of Zarechye. For this, the young man received 25.6 thousand rubles from an unknown person and did not share the money with the student. The 14-year-old teenager was not tried because he had not reached the age of criminal responsibility.
In his last word, Ibragimov said that he did not agree with the accusations. “I had no intention of undermining Russia’s economic security. I was careless: I took the job offer and wrote to the person. In the pre-trial detention center, I realized what I had done and now I am very repentant. I want to be with my family,” the young man addressed the court.
The 17-year-old defendant asked to be left free so that he “could play sports, work, help his mother, take care of her, since she needs a serious operation ahead,” and then began to cry. The third person said he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time” and vowed that “this will never happen again.”
The wardrobe is on fire. More than 65 people have already been detained in cases of sabotage on railways in Russia, every third is a minor.