A city police officer slammed his car into a female pedestrian on a central Moscow sidewalk while driving drunk, injuring the woman, senior police officials said Wednesday.
Police major Alexander Razumnykh, a senior officer with the Basmanny district precinct, was drunk when he ran over the woman with his Mercedes at about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday on Novoryazanskaya Ulitsa, near Komsomolskaya Ploshchad, Moscow traffic police chief Sergei Kazantsev said in a statement.
The woman, a 31-year-old resident of the Kurgan region who had temporary Moscow registration, was hospitalized with fractured ribs, Kazantsev said.
The Investigative Committee said in a statement Wednesday that officers with the city traffic police and the Basmanny precinct committed a gross violation of protocol by not informing prosecutors of the incident. The committee learned of the accident first from the media, the statement said.
Moscow police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev will fire Razumnykh and has asked city prosecutors to pursue possible criminal charges against the officer, city police spokesman Viktor Biryukov said.
Kolokoltsev also fired the officer's supervisor, Yury Bykov, deputy head of the city police's central district branch, citing a "low level of work with his personnel, which has led to a number of incidents," Biryukov told Interfax.
The police force remains one of the country's least trusted institutions. It has come under fire recently for rampant corruption and abuses, including several deadly traffic accidents.
Former city police officer Roman Zhirov will go on trial next week at Moscow's Nagatinsky District Court on charges of running over a pregnant woman crossing the street in southern Moscow last May, RIA-Novosti reported. Zhirov purportedly fled the scene, and the woman died of her injuries in a hospital.
Meanwhile, four city police officers from the central Presnensky district precinct have been fired while being investigated for purportedly providing protection for an illegal brothel, Interfax reported Wednesday.
A poll released Tuesday by the respected Levada Center shows that 67 percent of Russians do not trust law enforcement officials, while 77 percent feel vulnerable to abuses by law enforcement authorities.
The poll, conducted in January among 1,600 respondents in 46 regions, had a margin of error of 3.4 percent.