MOSCOW, March 18 (RIA Novosti) - A young woman was injured on Thursday when a rubber bullet hit her after a row between two men in the Moscow subway turned violent, police said.
A police spokesman said two men got into a quarrel on the subway. When they got off the train at the Timiryazevskaya station in northern Moscow, one of them used a self-defense aerosol spray, squirting it into the other's face.
The second man responded by shooting the first with a Strazhnik rubber-bullet pistol, grazing the hand of the spray user. The bullet continued on into the woman's leg.
"Both participants in the conflict were detained by police. The injured woman was hospitalized," the spokesman said.
Russia has recently seen a rise in crimes committed with so-called "traumatic weapons" designed for self-defense. A typical situation is when two people quarrel, and then one of them produces a rubber-bullet pistol, which is much easier to legally obtain than a normal handgun, and shoots the other, sometimes fatally.
In December 2009, the driver of a snow removal vehicle was shot dead in Moscow by a man whose car was scratched by the snow clearing machine.
