A court in Moscow has sentenced several men to lengthy prison terms in a deadly 2016 cemetery brawl case.
The Moscow City Court on November 14 found the former director of the Khovanskoye cemetery in the Russian capital, Yury Chabiyev, and a co-founder of Healthy Nation NGO, Aleksandr Bocharnikov, guilty of organizing the brawl in which three persons were killed in May 2016 and sentenced them to 11 and nine years in prison, respectively.
One of the participants in the brawl, Eldar Vaduyev, who ran over two men with a car during the clashes, was sentenced to 11 1/2 years in prison.
Thirteen other defendants received prison terms between 3 1/2 and 5 1/2 years.
Several other participants in the brawl and a suspected organizer of the clashes, the leader of the Healthy Nation group, Georgy Makaryev, who was arrested earlier in May, will be tried separately.
Russian authorities said in 2016 that some 200 people armed with guns, steel bars, and other weapons took part in the clashes at the Khovanskoye cemetery in southwest Moscow.
Media reports said then that ethnic groups from ex-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus were fighting over the cemetery's lucrative services business.