By IANS/RIA Novosti,
Moscow: Charges of raping an eight-year-old child have been brought against the former head of an Orthodox monastery in Central Russia’s Kostroma Region, police said Wednesday.
The 40-year-old suspect has already been convicted of sexually abusing a 14-year-old boy. He was sentenced to a year in a colony settlement, a low-security jail without armed guards, where prisoners are allowed to move freely and even live with their families.
“In 1997 he met an eight-year-old boy in the street and suggested he did some easy housework for him in exchange for a watch. After luring the small boy into his apartment, he sexually assaulted him,” the regional police department said in a press release.
Another church official, employed in the same diocese, was earlier sentenced to three years in a medium-security jail for numerous counts of child abuse and two counts of child rape.
The region’s governor Igor Slyunyaev has repeatedly expressed his support for harsher sentences for the two men.
Last week, hundreds of young people rallied “against paedophilia” in the regional capital, Kostroma.