Story By: Anna Casap, Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
This schoolboy is facing jail after he banged on the bonnet of a car that had parked on top of his puppy and the driver complained to cops.
The youngster Danil Safronov, 16, had been given the Laika breed puppy by his dad Evgeniy Safronov, whose age was not revealed.
Daniel said he had left the puppy in the yard outside a garage while he worked together with friends repairing a car in the Kashtak district of the city of Tomsk, which is located in Central Siberia in Russia.
But he ran outside when he heard the puppy, named Bertha, squealing and saw that the jeep driver had run over the three-month-old dog, and parked on top of it.
He said: “I saw that the had car stopped on top of the puppy. I ran out of the garage and screamed to the driver to move out. The Nissan driver did not respond, so I hit the hood of the car to get his attention. The man got out, began to apologise. But it was not possible to do anything to help my dog.”
The teenager’s father told local media that the traffic police and the district police had turned up and he said he had been asked to sign paperwork which he had assumed were just a formality without properly looking, believing that it meant that the man who had been driving was going to be prosecuted.
He said he was then shocked when he realised what he had signed been paperwork against his son, and that he was then summoned to appear in court over allegations that he had caused 14,000 RUB (173 GBP) of damage to the car by denting the hood and had been threatening and violent.
The driver of the car had apparently even alleged that the teenager had tried to extort money and made threats over the death of the puppy.
The dad said: “We had witnesses who were not even questioned. Investigators from the Leninsky District Department of Internal Affairs pressed my son and demanded to know why he specifically targeted the car. My son was in a state of shock, and what do they mean by ‘targeted the car’?
“They also added that we were to blame, because the dog didn’t have a muzzle, but what is a muzzle, we are talking about a puppy and it was less than 40 centimetres in length.”
He said that the allegations then got even more bizarre, with allegations that his son had been waving an axe.
According local media, investigators admitted that they had refused to open a case against the Nissan driver on the basis of clause 2 of part 1 of article 245 (cruelty to animals). But in the other direction Danil is accused of intentionally destroying or damaging someone else’s property – with a criminal case instituted under article 167.
He faces a 40,000 RUB (495 GBP) fine or two years in prison.
The family are now hoping that they can make use of the new law on the protection of animal rights in the Russian Federation, where animals are recognised not as human property, but as “creatures capable of experiencing emotions and physical suffering.” Cruelty to animals is punishable by up to five years in prison.
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