Moscow police on Monday promised to look into a complaint that a traffic police officer threatened a pregnant woman with a gun for failing to yield to an unidentified government official's car.
Ksenia Nozdrachyova was stopped and threatened on Kutuzovsky Prospekt on Friday after she didn’t make way for a vehicle equipped with a flashing blue light, her husband, Alexander, wrote on the LiveJournal blog for Blue Buckets, which fights the abuse of flashing blue lights.
Nozdrachyov said his wife could not yield because the traffic was too heavy.
The unidentified traffic policeman was about to let the woman go with a warning when he received an order by radio to “strip the [expletive] of her license,” said Nozdrachyov, who was not in the car but arrived at the scene after a phone call from his wife.
“My pregnant wife complained of not feeling well, and I wanted to drive her away,” Nozdrachyov said. “But the young uniformed man pulled out his gun and said we were going nowhere.”
The accusation could not be independently confirmed, but the traffic police officer does not explicitly deny it in a video filmed and uploaded to YouTube by Nozdrachyov. The video shows a policeman with a beet-red face stubbornly dodging questions about his name and rank.
Eight more “rude-talking” police arrived later, but all of them left after Nozdrachyov demanded that officers from the police’s internal affairs department be called to the scene, he said.
Blue Buckets leader Alexei Dozorov said his group would provide Nozdrachyov with legal assistance to file a complaint against the traffic police officer on abuse of office, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
“I've never heard about a situation like this before,” Dozorov said by telephone Monday.
A police spokesman said “disciplinary actions” would be sought against the officer should his guilt be proved in an inquiry, Itar-Tass reported.
The pregnant Nozdrachyova will also be placed under investigation and may be slapped with a fine of 500 rubles ($17) or lose her driver's license for three months for not yielding to the official’s car, the spokesman said.
The Prosecutor General's Office chided the traffic police on Monday for contributing to traffic jams by taking too long to reach road accidents.
The prosecutor’s office made its complaint in a letter to Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev that was posted on its web site.
Nurgaliyev did not comment on the letter Monday, but a police source told Interfax that long-standing rules oblige traffic police officers to reach the sites of car crashes within 20 minutes. He said there weren’t enough officers to reduce that time.
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