A police officer and his friend have been arrested on suspicion of raping a young woman in a banya in the Tatarstan republic, investigators said.
The unidentified officer, 30, who worked in Tatarstan's Tukayevsky district, and his 20-year-old friend on Oct. 6 raped the 25-year-old woman in Naberezhniye Chelny, a city in central Russia, according to investigators.
A local court on Sunday granted investigators' request to place both suspects under arrest pending a full inquiry, regional investigators said in a statement on their website.
Both suspects have been officially charged with premeditated rape by a group of people, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison, but deny their guilt.
This is not the first time that Tatarstan's police force has made headlines for criminal acts. In March, several police officers from Kazan's Dalny police station illegally detained a 52-year-old man and then allegedly tortured him to death.
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