A court in the Chechen capital Grozny has sentenced a 20-year-old man to 3.5 years in prison for burning a Quran outside a mosque in the central Russian city of Volgograd in May, Telegram channel SOTAVision reported on Tuesday.
The length of the sentence handed to Nikita Zhuravel was exactly the same as the prosecutors requested last week.
Despite the incident happening in Volgograd, Zhuravel was made to await his trial in a pretrial detention centre in the Muslim-majority republic of Chechnya. In September, Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov posted a video of his then 15-year-old son Adam beating Zhuravel up in custody and said that he was proud of his son for his actions.
Police declined to open a criminal case over the attack, but since then Adam Kadyrov has been named Hero of Chechnya and received multiple awards from other Muslim-majority regions in Russia.
Zhuravel, who was declared a political prisoner by the human rights group Memorial, was charged with “insulting the feelings of believers” and “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”.
