A teenager in west Russia has been sentenced to 8.5 years in a correctional facility for the brutal murder of his teacher, investigators say.
The boy involved was named only as Mikhail S., aged 15, from a small village in the Zhiryatinsk district of the Bryansk Region. He confessed that he had attacked his 55-year-old mathematics teacher Valery Smeyanov after the latter had given him bad marks and confiscated his mobile phone during a lesson.
Smeyanov's body was discovered on February 12 in a river under a bridge in the boy's home village of Knyavich.
Investigators determined that Mikhail had hit his teacher twice in the back of the head and then thrown him off the bridge into the water below, where he died. Before doing so, the teen stole 2,000 rubles (just under $70) from his teacher's pocket.
Police were led to Mikhail by a tip-off, and also by one of Smeyanov's notebooks, in which the teacher had written that a student had stolen money from him.
Mikhail fled after the killing and was discovered by police in the regional capital of Bryansk. He confessed after questioning.
Russia has seen an explosion of teenage crime since the split-up of the Soviet Union. In April 2009, in one of the more high-profile cases, a group of East Siberian teenagers known as the "Blood Magic gang" were convicted of the murders of five people. The Irkutsk teens, all aged between 14 and 15, tortured their victims to death on the orders of a 22-year-old former teacher.
MOSCOW, January 19 (RIA Novosti)
