MOSCOW (Arka)—A Russian prosecutor demands that Hrachya Harutyunyan, an Armenian truck driver, who was involved in a bus crash near Moscow last summer that left 18 people dead and 40 others injured, be sentenced to 7 years in prison, RIA Novosti reported.
During the trial Harutyunyan pleaded guilty to traffic violation that led to one of the biggest accidents in the Moscow region.
According to Russian news reports, on July 13, 2013 the gravel-loaded truck driven by Hrachya Harutiunian, an Armenian citizen working in Russia, collided with a packed commuter bus outside the Russian capital.
The investigation revealed that the accident resulted from poor maintenance of the truck resulting in a brake malfunction. Harutyunyan, according to investigators, was to know about it.
Harutiunian’s arrest caused controversy when he was made to appear in court wearing a women’s gown hours after his accident and arrest. Russian news anchors chided and sneered at the man, who was shown on TV crying in court. The Armenian media condemned the display as a deliberate affront to personal dignity and a display of Russian xenophobia and racism.
The prison term asked by the prosecutor is the longest term for people accused of road accidents killing more than two persons, if the perpetrator at the time of the accident was sober.
That is a VERY generous sentence considering how many innocent people he killed. In the USA he would have reveived at least that much or more as well as multiple civil case litigations against him on behalf of the victims’ families.
There should be no complaints at all from our community at large, a very fair and just punishment considering the incident in its entirety.
Unfortunately – or fortunately – for Hrachya Harutyunyan, while 18 innocent people perished, he survived to suffer this gruelling day in court. Grief beyond belief is the only sane outcome of such a senario, as is white hot anger on the part of the victims’s next of kin and the community at large. The take away from this unspeakable tragedy is that by paying attention to the small things life, taking the extra moment to correct some irregularity, you can prevent an event from happening. And that will make a huge difference in your life.
But you will be blissfully unaware of it as your life and that of 58 others just goes on as normal. Everybody gets to their destination, secretly hoping that they someday hit the jackpot, without realising that they just did – because the driver of the Gravel truck that just passed stopped to check his brakes and get them fixed the day before.
hratchia could be considered lucky at such a lenient sentence