The Petrozavodsk City Court found Andrei Antonov, 44, pastor of the city's Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit, guilty of organizing a criminal group in 2007 with a friend, Gennady Yeroshkin, who worked for Karelia's Federation of Bodybuilders. The two men were accused of selling illegal steroids to bodybuilders at a gym in Petrozavodsk, the capital of the republic in northwestern Russia.
Yeroshkin was sentenced to four years in prison Monday.
Officers with the Federal Drug Control Service and the Federal Security Service seized more than 8,000 pills and 200 vials of steroids, most of which were kept in the church where the pastor worked, when they arrested the two men in March 2008, Interfax said.
During a search of the church, Antonov willingly turned over a TT semiautomatic pistol that he owned, it said.
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