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MOTHER, DAUGHTER FACE 10 YEARS FOR STUN-GUN ROBBERY

By Natalya Krainova

Staff writer

An elderly Moscow woman and her daughter are facing up to 10 years in prison for purportedly using a stun device to rob a company offering a knitting course in which the daughter had enrolled, city police said.

The daughter paid 10,000 rubles ($360) for the knitting classes but became disenchanted with the course and demanded a refund, police said in a statement.

«We have information that they weren’t satisfied with the quality of teaching,» police spokesman Anatoly Lastovetsky said of the mother and daughter.

Police identified the two women only by their first names and the first initial of their last names: Svetlana A., 35, and Iraida A., 73.

With the aim of retrieving Svetlana’s money, the two women went to the office of the company running the knitting courses on 1st Ulitsa Yamskogo Polya, near the Belorusskaya metro station in northern Moscow.

The company secretary asked the women to draw up a written request for a refund addressed to the company’s director, a common requirement for reimbursement in Russia.

The two women, however, demanded their money back immediately. After the secretary refused, the elderly woman pulled an electric-shock device from her purse and stunned the employee with the device, police said.

The two women then snatched the secretary’s purse, which contained 34,000 rubles ($1,200), and fled the office, according to police.

After recovering from the electric shock, the secretary reported the incident to police, who detained the two suspects at their apartment shortly thereafter.

Police opened a robbery investigation Thursday, the city police said. 1

$100M Painting Stolen

KIEV – A painting worth as much as $100 million has been stolen from a museum in the Ukrainian port of Odessa.

Museum workers said they had repeatedly asked city authorities to modernize the security system. Police said the thieves bypassed an alarm by entering through a window.

Staff of the Museum of Western and Eastern Art said Friday that the painting – by Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and called «The Taking of Christ (Or the Kiss of Judas)» was found missing Thursday. 2

7 Dead in Japan After Killing Spree

TOKYO – A Japanese man rammed a truck into a crowd of shoppers, jumped out and went on a stabbing spree in Tokyo’s top electronics district Sunday, killing at least seven people and wounding 10 others.

The deadly lunchtime assault paralyzed the Akihabara neighborhood, which is popular among the country’s cyber-wise youth. The killings were the latest in a series of grisly knifings that have stoked fears of rising crime in Japan.

A 25-year-old man, Tomohiro Kato, was apprehended in the attack. Local news reports initially said the man was a self-proclaimed mobster, but national media later said he was not.

«The suspect told police that he came to Akihabara to kill people,» said Jiro Akaogi, a spokesman for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.

«He said he was tired of life. He said he was sick of everything,» Akaogi said.

The violence began when he crashed a rented, 2-ton truck into pedestrians. News reports said he jumped out and began stabbing the people he had knocked down with the truck and then turned on horrified onlookers.

Police confirmed seven deaths – six men and one woman – but they could not say whether the victims had died of injuries from the truck or were stabbed to death.

Reports said the attacker grunted and roared as he slashed and stabbed at Sunday shoppers crowding a street lined with huge stores packed with computers and other advanced electronics. 3

Senior Diplomat Arrested

A senior Foreign Ministry official was placed under arrest Wednesday on suspicion of accepting bribes, Itar-Tass reported.

Alexander Gusev, deputy head of the ministry’s department on relations with federation subjects, the parliament and public associations, was detained by the Federal Security Service on Tuesday night, a ministry source told news agency.

Gusev is suspected of taking bribes in exchange for foreign travel passports and for placing people on official delegations traveling abroad, the report said.

Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court issued an arrest warrant for him Wednesday, Itar-Tass said. 4

83-Year-Old Murder Suspect Detained

Police in Kamchatka have detained an 83-year-old woman suspected of beating her husband to death with a frying pan, regional authorities said Tuesday.

The pensioner and her husband, 89, were quarreling at about 9 a.m. Monday in their apartment in the Far East city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky when she grabbed the frying pan, smashed him over the head with it and then passed out, the regional branch of the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

She awoke to discover that her husband was not breathing, the statement said.

Police are investigating the incident and waiting for an autopsy to determine whether the blow from the frying pan caused the man’s death, Interfax reported.

Police are reluctant to place the woman under arrest given her advanced age. 5

Man Learns He Is a Prisoner

A Chelyabinsk man trying to register his gun discovered to his surprise that he was officially registered as serving a prison term, regional prosecutors said Tuesday.

The man, whose name was not given, went to police to get a license for his gun and was informed that he had been convicted of vehicular homicide in 2006 and was listed as serving time in prison, prosecutors said.

Investigators subsequently determined that a distant relative of the man was using the man’s passport and driver’s license during the trial.

A Chelyabinsk court has expunged the conviction from the man’s record, prosecutors said. 6

Air Rage Woman in Court

BANGOR, Maine – A Russian-born woman who purportedly consumed prescription drugs, wine and liquid soap then clashed with members of the flight crew on a London-bound jetliner has waived a bail hearing.

Galina Rusanova, a Russian-born artist who lives in London, appeared briefly in U.S. District Court on Monday before being returned to jail.

Rusanova faces federal charges of assault and interference with a flight crew.

Prosecutors say Rusanova, 54, punched and kicked attendants and began «snapping like a dog» while trying to bite a crew member’s leg.

The FBI said she had gone to Los Angeles to visit a man she met over the Internet and was returning Wednesday when her flight on Chicago-based United Airlines was diverted to Bangor. 7

Corruption On the Rise

Policemen, teachers and doctors are the country’s top bribe takers, ahead of bureaucrats, Prosecutor General Yury Chaika said in a new report, Vedomosti reported Tuesday.

Prosecutors sent 28,451 corruption cases to court last year, up 5.2 percent from 2007, Chaika said in the report, which is to be presented to the Federation Council on May 13.

«Corruption has been escalating over the last 10 years at every level of legal and government administration,» Chaika said in the report, Vedomosti reported.

Eighty percent of those charged with bribery took less than 30,000 rubles, ($900), the report said. 8

Cop Charged in Rampage

Moscow police officer Denis Yevsyukov has been charged with multiple homicide for his rampage in a local supermarket last week in which he shot nine people, killing three, the Investigative Committee said Tuesday.

Authorities say Yevsyukov, head of a police precinct in southern Moscow, shot dead a cab driver and then walked into a supermarket where he shot eight more killing two. The investigation is continuing, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

If convicted, Yevsyukov faces up to life in prison. 9

Family Found Dead in Car

A senior regional police official was found dead with his wife and two young children in a partly burned car peppered with bullet holes near Rostov-on-Don, RIA-Novosti reported Wednesday.

It was not clear what the official, identified as a head of the special police unit SOBR from Nizhny Novgorod, was doing in the area with his family. The report said the children were born in 1998 and 2002. Investigators have determined that a Kalashnikov rifle was used to fire on the car and the attackers then set the vehicle on fire. But somehow the fire did not spread,» a police spokesman told RIA-Novosti. 10

Police Shoot Suspected Thief

A police officer shot dead a suspected car thief at around 6 a.m. Wednesday in northern Moscow after the suspect attacked him with a hammer, Interfax reported.