Moscow resident Elizaveta Mazurova was sentenced to 12.5 years in a penal colony for attacking a woman on the instructions of scammers

As Mediazona reports from the courtroom, Judge Konstantin Dubkov partially upheld the victim’s civil claim and ordered Mazurova to pay 600,000 rubles in compensation instead of the requested one million.

Mazurova was charged under articles on attempted murder and robbery. According to the prosecution, she acted as part of an organized criminal group, got someone to open the door for her, and sprayed Tikhomirova with pepper spray.

Mazurova herself said that she had fallen victim to scammers. According to her, they convinced her that money had been transferred in her name to Ukrainian military personnel, and forced her to attack Tikhomirova in order to take 4 million rubles from her.

According to Mazurova, the scammers called Tikhomirova an “foreign agent”, claimed that she had obtained the money illegally and was planning a terrorist attack in a kindergarten. Mazurova’s defense lawyer said that she did not intend to kill Tikhomirova; according to him, the investigation did not identify the other members of the group, and a letter from human rights activist Eva Merkacheva asking for leniency toward Mazurova was included in the case file.

The defendant’s mother stated that she has epilepsy and psychiatric illnesses that worsened in pretrial detention.