Amid a public outcry over a possible cover-up on behalf of a LUKoil vice president, Moscow police released video footage of the moments preceding a car crash that killed two women last month.
The blurry footage, however, appears to provide few clues about who is at fault for the accident during morning rush hour traffic on Feb. 25 on Leninsky Prospekt.
LUKoil vice president Anatoly Barkov's Mercedes S-500 collided head-on with a Citroen C3 driven by gynecologist Olga Alexandrina, killing the 35-year-old gynecologist and her mother-in-law, Vera Sidelnikova, 72, also a gynecologist.
Barkov and his driver sustained minor injuries.
The video footage released by Moscow traffic police on Friday shows a Mercedes driving toward the city center in the leftmost lane and then indicating by its turn signal that it was planning to turn left onto the VIP-only lane located in the middle of the street.
Moscow traffic police chief Sergei Kazantsev told reporters Friday that police cameras could not have captured the traffic accident because their views were blocked by an advertising billboard.
Police initially accused Alexandrina of causing the accident by illegally pulling into the oncoming lane of traffic. But an intense and angry campaign in the Russian media and blogosphere suggested that the Mercedes was more likely to have illegally pulled into the oncoming lane because it was traveling on the traffic-clogged side of the road leading to downtown, while the Citroen was traveling on the empty side in the opposite direction.
Kazantsev and police investigator Alexei Kuznetsov said at the news conference that it was difficult to positively identify Barkov's car because of the poor quality of the footage.
Barkov has called for a thorough investigation.
A clip of the footage in question is embedded below.
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