A former Chechen attorney’s assistant has been sentenced for turning an otherwise normal ceremony into a real shotgun wedding on the streets of Moscow.
Investigators say Magomed Guchigov, 27, was detained in 2016 after a dashboard camera recorded at least four shots being fired from a Bentley in a wedding cortege on a southern Moscow highway. He was subsequently fired from his place of employment at a Chechen district attorney’s office and charged with hooliganism.
In 2015, local authorities in Russia's North Caucasus region created a special "wedding police" force to crack down on the custom of discharging firearms in the air as a form of celebration during wedding parties.
“A court handed Guchigov a suspended sentence of 1.5 years,” Moscow’s Investigative Committee said in a statement Monday.
Guchigov is reported to be the nephew of Chechen police chief Nazhud Guchigov, who made headlines in 2015 for taking a 17-year-old as his second wife.
A second wedding guest was detained during the Sept. 11, 2016, wedding procession, Interfax cited investigators as saying, without disclosing his procedural status.
