Failure to step in during murder earns Russian traffic police officers 3.5 years of correctional labour

A court in Yekaterinburg has sentenced two former traffic police officers to three and a half years of correctional labour after finding them guilty of negligence over their initial failure to intervene in the brutal murder of an African postgraduate student in 2023, the regional Prosecutor’s Office announced on Tuesday.

The two men were found guilty of negligence resulting in the death of a person and were banned from state employment for two years.

According to investigators, traffic police officers Gennady Izergin and Ivan Oleynikov were in a police car in Yekaterinburg on 18 August 2023, when African postgraduate student François Njelassili was stabbed for allegedly flirting with a woman in Burger King. He later died of his injuries.

Njelassili, a Gabonese national pursuing a doctorate in economics, had been eating with a friend when he began talking to a woman in the restaurant, when he was attacked by two men, Nikolay Lebedkin and Daniil Fomin. While it was Lebedkin who first attacked Njelassili, it was Fomin who delivered the fatal stab wound. Both subsequently fled the scene.

Izergin and Oleinikov witnessed the murder, but initially ignored the altercation and only intervened when asked to do so by a passerby. Both men were dismissed prior to their trial.

In September, 23-year-old Fomin was sentenced to eight years imprisonment for murdering Njelassili, after members of a neo-Nazi forum on social media platform VK crowdfunded part of Fomin’s legal team. There have been no reports of Lebedkin being charged for attacking Njelassili.