A young woman serving a three-year sentence for a high-profile shooting in the Moscow metro in 2012 is to be released early on parole, a news report said Wednesday.
A court in the Kaluga region on Wednesday granted Alexandra Lotkova's request for release on parole, according to the RAPSI legal news agency. Lotkova, who has served more than half of her sentence, will be released in 10 days as long as prosecutors do not appeal the court's ruling, the report said.
Moscow's Tverskoi District Court sentenced Lotkova to three years in prison on March 20, 2013, for injuring a man with a non-lethal weapon in the Tsvetnoi Bulvar metro station a year earlier.
The verdict divided observers at the time. Lotkova, a university student, insisted that she had acted in self-defense to protect herself and her friends. The incident occurred late at night in May 2012, when Lotkova's friends got into a scuffle with a group of men in the metro.
A video of the fight showed Lotkova pull a traumatic pistol out of her purse and fire it at one of the men, causing him serious injury.
Throughout the trial, Lotkova's defense maintained that the other group of men had been drunk and acting menacingly, and that they had provoked the fight. They denied this and said Lotkova's friends were to blame for starting the violence.
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