A Russian court has sentenced six associates of the late Maksim Martsinkevich, a notorious Russian ultranationalist who died while in detention in 2020, on charges of murder motivated by ethnic hatred to prison terms between eight and 15 years.
A court in the city of Sergiyev Posad near Moscow on August 1 sentenced Andrei Kail to 15 years, Semyon Tokmakov, Aleksei Gudilin, and Pavel Khrulyov to 13 years each, Maksim Khotulev to 10 years, and Aleksandr Lysenkov to eight years in prison.
A jury earlier found the six men guilty of murdering and dismembering four men in two incidents in Moscow and the Moscow region in 2003 and 2007.
Investigators said they were able to find the perpetrators thanks to information they received from Martsinkevich shortly before his death in a detention center in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk in September 2020, which sparked allegations of foul play.
Officials said Martsinkevich, also known by his nickname Tesak (Machete), committed suicide as he faced a possible life sentence over ethnically charged killings committed in the mid-2000s.
Martsinkevich's parents have insisted that their son was murdered while in custody. Their repeated requests to launch a probe into his death have been rejected by Russian authorities.
In addition to his neo-Nazi activities, Martsinkevich founded a homophobic group whose aim was to "cure" homosexuals.
Russian authorities opened an investigation into Martsinkevich after several videos circulated on the Internet in 2013 showing him and his followers humiliating and beating gays.
In December 2018, a court in Moscow found Martsinkevich guilty of robbery and hooliganism and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. The sentence was later trimmed by more than one year.
Before that, Martsinkevich had been convicted three times on extremism charges.
While in prison, he said he had abandoned his neo-Nazi views.