Everything is easier

Hieromonk Elijah (Pavel Semin), accused of an accident on Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow, in which two people died, admitted his guilt, RIA Novosti reports.

"The Dorogomilovsky court heard the testimony of the accused. Semin admitted that he had twice violated traffic rules, and also admitted that he understood that no matter what car the people were hit by - his Mercedes or the Skoda that he drove into, everything happened according to his fault,” Igor Trunov, a representative of the victims, told RAPSI on Thursday.

Semin, according to Trunov, noted that he did not hide from the scene of the accident, but was taken by a person whom he did not know, but whom he himself knew. "He said that after the incident he asked this man to take him home. Having arrived home, he went to bed, got up in the morning, drank coffee and, having learned about what had happened from the news, began calling friends and lawyers. Explain why he did not call an ambulance immediately after the accident, he couldn’t,” Trunov said.

The representative of the victims noted that the witness who told the court that people on Kutuzovsky Prospekt were hit not by the hieromonk’s car, but by a Skoda, is suspected of giving false testimony. “An employee of Gormost, who was questioned by the court later, said that Georgy Zimin was in a place from where he could not see what was happening,” Trunov explained.

According to the lawyer, on Friday, June 21, the court will continue to question the last witness in order to eliminate discrepancies in the testimony, and then will move on to the debate stage.

As follows from the case materials, the accident occurred on August 15, 2012, late in the evening. The driver of a Mercedes Gelandewagen SUV, Pavel Semin, hit three workers and crashed into a Gazelle parked behind a fence. Then Semin’s car, changing its trajectory, hit a Skoda car traveling in the same direction. Both foreign cars overturned from the impact. As a result of the accident, two workers died on the spot, and another was hospitalized.

For a long time, Hieromonk Elijah stated that he did not consider himself guilty of the deaths of the workers. “After the collision with the Skoda, I lost consciousness; I don’t remember the further events of the accident,” said the accused.

It's good that he changed his position. We all know our justice, and if it suddenly turned out that the hieromonk who escaped from the scene of the accident was as clean as glass, and it was not even the Skoda driver who was to blame, but the dead workers - would such a court decision surprise many? It’s good that the church still remained unsullied by such a forgery; I don’t know what worked here: the conscience of Fr. Elijah, pressure from the patriarchy or the unexpected desire of the investigative authorities to “judge fairly.”