The Moscow City Court on Tuesday sentenced a group of ultranationalist young people to prison terms for three attempted murders and other crimes committed out of ethnic hatred.
Nine men and one woman received punishments ranging from a three-year suspended sentence to 10 years in prison after being convicted of a slew of charges, including attempted murder, assault, hooliganism and inciting ethnic hatred, Interfax reported.
Seven defendants attempted to kill nationals of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and China between February and March 2008 in Moscow, prosecutors said.
One of the group’s leaders, Yevgenia Zhikhareva, is also a suspect in a separate criminal case into a series of explosions and racist murders in Moscow in 2008 and 2009, RIA-Novosti reported. Zhikhareva is suspected of helping plant a bomb in a McDonald’s restaurant near the Kuzminki metro station on Jan. 16, which law enforcement officials disarmed it before it went off, as well as helping to detonate bombs on railroad tracks in southern Moscow on Oct. 5 and Nov. 4 and at a Moscow church on Nov. 30, RIA-Novosti said.
Zhikhareva has said she follows a cult that worships pagan gods, Kommersant reported in July. She was sentenced to eight years in prison Tuesday.