Moscow stabber gets 13 years in jail
Alexander Koptsev, 20, sentenced Monday for brutal stabbing attack which wounded 9 at Moscow’s Great Synagogue in January; St. Petersburg Chief Rabbi says satisfied with 13-year sentence, but it 'could have been harsher'
Alexander Kopstev, the Russian man convicted of wounding nine Jewish worshippers in a stabbing attack at Moscow’s Great Synagogue in January, was sentenced to 13 years in prison on Monday.
The sentence is relatively severe, although it is lighter than the 16-year sentence requested by the prosecution, according to a Russian Interfax news agency report.
Chief Rabbi of the St. Petersburg Jewish community, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Pevzner, told Ynet he was pleased with the sentence.
“The fact that he was punished is in itself a good thing. In my opinion he could have gotten a longer term, but (13) is a quite a few years. The message that goes out to everyone is that you cannot behave this way. They wanted to say he was psychotic, insane, but now we know there is trial and justice,” Pevzner said.
In January of this year, Koptsev, 20, stormed Moscow’s Great Synagogue in the city’s Bolshaya Bronaya neighborhood during evening prayers, and attacked worshippers there with a knife. He told interrogators that he was attempting murder out of “jealousy of Jews, because they live better. . . Russia has foreign saboteurs – blacks, Chinese and Jews.”
He was indicted for attempted murder, assault, and activities intended to humiliate a religious or ethnic group – a Russian legal clause against anti-Semitism.
“In his testimony, the defendant confirmed the story he gave during his initial interrogation – that the attack was planned in advance and targeting a certain group,” a Russian news agency quoted prosecutor Kira Godim, who presented her case in a Moscow court Monday.
The prosecution claimed that Koptsev acted on his own and did not belong to any extremist or racist organization. According to reports, medical examinations determined that he was sane when he carried out the attack, but that he suffers from schizophrenia, which affected his behavior.
State of shock after attack
Koptsev said the he alone “cannot deal with the situation” but hoped to attract public attention to the matter with the stabbing attacks. He said he was inspired by books he read and data he saw on the Internet, and that he had planned to commit suicide after the attack but the Jewish worshippers tackled him to the ground before he could do so.
At his first court hearing, Koptsev told judges that “criminal law was written by Jews and Jewish Mafiosos, and therefore I refuse to recognize my guilt.”
Moscow’s Jewish community, which has been in a state of renewal over the past few years since the great immigration waves from Russia to Israel in the last two decades, was in a state of shock after the attack. Members of the community said that the incident proves that xenophobia and anti-Semitism are on the rise in Russia in recent years. The Jewish community criticized the Russian government for dealing with such hate crimes too lightly.
