A 35yearold father has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for “convincing” his best friend to kill himself after discovering he had sexually abused his daughter.
Vyacheslav Matrosov, who lives in Russia, is said to have found videos on the mobile phone of Oleg Sviridov, 32, recording the man’s sexual abuse of the sixyearold child. According to Russian media, Sviridov was the girl’s godfather.
According to police investigations, the man gave his friend an ultimatum to confess the sexual abuse to the authorities after the crime was discovered. He would have refused and therefore got into a physical fight with the girl’s father.
Days later, Sviridov’s body was found in a grave with stab wounds. However, a forensic analysis revealed that Matrosov had buried his friend’s body, but the man’s stab wounds were selfinflicted, that is, inflicted by the victim himself, British tabloid Mirror reported.
The case was registered in September 2021, but the Russian court allowed Matrosov to await his sentence under house arrest. He could have been sentenced to 15 years in a closed regime if the court understood that he was the author of the murder.
However, the decision found that the man committed the crime of “inciting a person to commit suicide by threat or abuse”.
Even with a shorterthanexpected sentence, the court decision caused controversy in the village of Pribrezhnoye, where the men lived and where two other children were allegedly sexually abused by the dead suspect.
Friends of the arrested man pooled their money to pay for his defense, and a petition signed by 2,500 people called for him to be exonerated of the crime of “saving children by getting rid of a sex offender”.
“We are very sad to hear the verdict. Everyone expected his sentence to be suspended, but we were shocked by the 18 months in prison,” Oksana Kazakova, mother of another child who was also allegedly raped, told East2West. news.