Organizer of 1998 political killing jailed 17 years
Print Edition
A Russian court yesterday sentenced the organizer of the 1998 killing of prominent opposition politician Galina Starovoitova to 17 years in prison.
Saint Petersburg’s Oktyabrsky district court sentenced former lawmaker Mikhail Glushchenko to 17 years in a tough-regime prison colony for organizing Starovoitova’s murder almost two decades ago.
The gunning down of the 52-year-old liberal member of parliament in the stairwell of her home was one of Russia’s most notorious political killings of the 1990s.
“The court established that Glushchenko along with an unidentified person decided to kill State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova with the aim of ending her active political and governmental activity,” the prosecutor-general’s office said in a statement.
A charismatic politician and rights activist, Starovoitova was an MP in the State Duma and chaired Democratic Russia party. She was also an advisor to Boris Yeltsin during his presidency.
In 2005, a court in Saint Petersburg convicted two hitmen, one of whom was disguised as a woman at the crime scene, and sentenced them to 23 and 20 years, but failed to identify the mastermind.
Glushchenko, a former deputy for the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was arrested in 2009 over a separate case after being on the run for several years.
His sentence took into account that he is already serving an eight-year sentence for extortion in a separate case after being convicted in 2013.
Glushchenko, who appeared in court in a crumpled gray suit, pleaded guilty to being one of the organizers of Starovoitova’s murder and asked for “forgiveness from the Russian people.”
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