Russian teenager who virtually wanted to “skip FSB” sentenced to five years in prison

Nikita Ouvarov was pursued for “terrorism” on the basis of confessions that his friends say they have signed under pressure. Their attack project was based on the Minecraft video game.

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Nikita Ouvarov, 16, is a terrorist. Thus judged, Thursday, February 10, the Russian military court called to rule on the fate of this rebel teenager, stuck in a town of Siberia on the clogged horizon. He was sentenced to five years in prison for “prepared for the conduct of terrorist activities”.

Given the file, which rested on extremely tenus elements, it is a very heavy verdict. It seems, however, to have been pronounced as a kind of half-measure: the Prosecution claimed nine years, and six years against its two accomplices, the friends with whom he had created an anarchist circle in their city of Kansk. These are convicted but exempted from sentence for cooperating in the investigation.

This last point is surprising, the two boys who, on the contrary, explained during the trial that their confession had been extorted under pressure. Nikita Ouvarov was continued more severe because he has always refused to confess and was considered the leader of the group. He has already spent eleven months in pre-trial detention, in punitive conditions: during this period, his mother saw all his requests for rejected parlor, and the first phone call to his son was allowed only after seven months of detention.

Molotov cocktail manufacturing

The verdict was returned by a military court came especially from the Far East for the trial. The day before, the teenager’s lawyer, Vladimir Vasin, said to keep the hope of an acquittal, explaining that the hearings had held “in a much more correct way, with respect to the respect of the procedures, that a civil court “. But in Russia, the courts do not pronounce an acquittal than in 0.3% of cases judged.

In the few Russian media that reported it, the case quickly became “the Minecraft trial”, because the only attack project clearly mentioned in the file is the one that the three boys, aged 14 to 15 years old, fomented in this video game where users can model buildings. They thus evoked the idea of ​​making it “skip the FSB”, the Russian security services. Project that cohabited, in their long correspondence that [Nime] had been able to consult, with others: “break the rear window of an agent’s car”, “throw a grenade in the Bania [sauna] of Putin” or build “A magnetic barrel”.

Nikita Ouvarov and his friends only recognized the “preparation of explosive material”: they repeatedly made Molotov cocktails, whom they exploded in the familiar abandoned buildings of the Kansk landscape, filming Hilares. They asked to be sentenced according to this charge, but denied any attack project and presented these activities as a game.

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/Media reports.