Sochi resident who blew up drilling units sentenced to five years of imprisonment

The Court of Sochi has sentenced the local resident, who blew up this spring a drilling unit in his protest against holding the Olympiad-2014 in the city, to five years of imprisonment.

The news item placed in the web site of the Interior Department of the city-resort Sochi runs that in the course of investigation and judicial hearing it has been established that the accused Mr Molchanov indicated the basic motive of his crime to be in the environmental problems of Sochi, in particular, he disliked the great amount of construction machinery that had accumulated in the city.

Meanwhile, it follows from the materials of the criminal case that the protest against the 2014 Olympiad was not the motive of his crime. Molchanov blew up his last drilling unit on March 22, 2007, and on April 19, 2007, he was detained. When Sochi was announced to be the venue of the Olympic Games (July 4, 2007), Molchanov had already been under investigation and kept at the pre-trial facility, the news item notes. No attributes of extremist activity were revealed in the suspect's actions.

We remind you that residents of Sochi have more than once expressed their concern of possible implications of the city's preparation to the Olympiad, having stated that the Federal Programme "The 2006-2014 Development of Sochi as Mountain-Climatic Resort" will entail mass violations of constitutional rights of citizens.

This Federal Programme is also opposed  by a number of ecological, public and political organizations, who are convinced that its implementation will result in an ecological catastrophe and inevitable scandals of the authorities with the city's population.