Two Moscow police officers have started a hunger strike after being accused of abuse of authority during the detention of a senator’s nephew, who was allegedly involved in a drunken brawl, a lawyer for one of them said Wednesday.

A criminal case against four police officers who broke up a January altercation could be sent to Moscow’s Tushinsky District Court in early December, Dmitry Bakharev, a lawyer for defendant Ruslan Kayumov, told The Moscow Times.

He said Kayumov and another officer, Yevgeny Stepanov, began an indefinite hunger strike Nov. 5 to protest the “fabricated” charges against them.

Kayumov, Stepanov and the other two officers, Alexei Vinogradov and Yury Uvarov, face up to 10 years in prison if charged and convicted. The Tushinsky District Court initially approved their arrests, but the decision was later overturned by Moscow City Court.

They are now on orders not to leave the city.

Prosecutors from Moscow’s Northwest Administrative District say the officers exceeded their authority when detaining Mansur Aslakhanov, son of Omsk Senator Aslambek Aslakhanov.

The younger Aslakhanov is an officer with the Moscow police’s criminal investigation department, Valery Glushakov, a lawyer for Vinogradov, said by telephone.

Aslakhanov and several other people were detained at a Moscow cafe on the night of Jan. 23 during a fight between Chechens and Armenians, after which Aslakhanov threatened participants of the fight with a gun, Glushakov said by phone.

Aslakhanov and several of the others later filed complaints at the officers’ precinct, claiming that they were illegally detained and that the officers had beaten them, Glushakov said. The four say Aslakhanov resisted the detention and pushed Uvarov, who fell and suffered a concussion.

Nikolai Myulberg, a deputy head of the investigation department at the Mitino police precinct, released several participants in the fight, including Aslakhanov, whom he had known as a former officer of the Mitino police precinct, without charges, Glushakov said.

But police forwarded the complaints by those detained to the Tushinsky district prosecutor’s office, which opened a criminal case in March. It was later turned over to the prosecutor’s office for the Northwest Administrative District, he said.

Attempts to contact Aslakhanov or his lawyers were unsuccessful. An officer at the department where Aslakhanov works said he would try to contact him to see whether he would comment.

An officer at the Mitino precinct said Wednesday that his superiors would only comment during a personal meeting, and not by phone or in writing.

Repeated calls to the prosecutor’s office of Moscow’s northwest district went unanswered Wednesday.