BARNAUL, Russia -- Three young men in the central Russian city of Barnaul have been found guilty of killing of a Korean student and sentenced to heavy jail terms, RFE/RL's Russian Service reports.
Kyeng Byong-gil, a South Korean exchange student who came to the Barnaul Teacher Training Academy last year, and a female Korean student were brutally attacked last year.
Kyeng died in the hospital and his compatriot was severely injured in the assault.
University students Anton Berdikhin and Aleksandr Yeltsov were sentenced to 16 years in prison today after being found guilty of Kyeng's murder.
The third attacker, an underage teenager whose name was not made public, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in a juvenile prison.
The court also ruled that each man must pay 500,000 rubles ($17,300) to Kyeng's family.
Investigators originally did not consider the case a hate crime, but later discovered the three suspects had been involved in other attacks against non-Slavic men and women in Barnaul. That allowed them to charge the three with a hate crime.
Read more in Russian here
Kyeng Byong-gil, a South Korean exchange student who came to the Barnaul Teacher Training Academy last year, and a female Korean student were brutally attacked last year.
Kyeng died in the hospital and his compatriot was severely injured in the assault.
University students Anton Berdikhin and Aleksandr Yeltsov were sentenced to 16 years in prison today after being found guilty of Kyeng's murder.
The third attacker, an underage teenager whose name was not made public, was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in a juvenile prison.
The court also ruled that each man must pay 500,000 rubles ($17,300) to Kyeng's family.
Investigators originally did not consider the case a hate crime, but later discovered the three suspects had been involved in other attacks against non-Slavic men and women in Barnaul. That allowed them to charge the three with a hate crime.
Read more in Russian here
