News

Two local citizen of Leningrad Region sentenced to life imprisonment for murders of pensioners

Evidence gathered by Leningrad Regional Directorate of the Investigative Committee of Russia was found by court to be sufficient to sentence Roman Shashkov and Mikhail Verbitsky. They were found guilty of committing offences under Paragraphs A, C, G and H of Part 2 of Article 105 (murder of two persons known by the killers to be at helpless state committed by a group of persons and attended by robbery with violence); and Paragraph C of Part 4 of Article 162 (robbery with violence with infliction of grave injury to the victim) of the Criminal Code of Russia.

According to investigation and to the court, at night on March 16, 2006, Shashkov and Verbitsky entered a private house in Vyritsa village of Gatchinsky District of Leningrad Region inhabited by two sisters of 71 and 83 years old. The perpetrators attacked the senior women, assaulted them by punching, kicking and hitting with a tire iron, set the house on fire and fled the scene. The women died. The prey of perpetrators totalled several thousand roubles.

The perpetrators committed a similar offence on the night of February 18, 2010, when they robbed an 84-year-old man threatening to kill him, threw him on the floor from his bed, covered him with clothes and furniture items, set the house on fire and escaped. The victim died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Verbitsky was sentenced to life imprisonment in a special regime penal colony and his brother Shashkov to 15 years of deprivation of freedom; however, taking into account his sentence of 2012, he will also serve a life sentence. Previously a jury reached a guilty verdict on this case.

We shall remind that, in 2012, the Leningrad Regional Court found Shashkov and Verbitsky guilty of a murder of five persons, eight assaults and a number of other offences. Shashkov was sentenced to life imprisonment in a special regime colony. Verbitsky was sentenced to deprivation of freedom for a term of 19 years in a strict regime colony.