Blogger Areg Shchepikhin, kidnapped by Chechens in central Moscow, was sentenced to five years in prison.

Court of Fontaine recognized He was found guilty of insulting the feelings of believers and sentenced to a year less than the prosecutor requested.

History Arega Shchepikhina received widespread publicity on June 3, when a group of Chechens beat up him at the Yaroslavsky railway station Moscow and loaded it into the trunk of a Mercedes with FSO license plates. Later, the Chechen Minister for National Policy Ahmed Dudayev claimedthat the blogger was “detained” because he “repeatedly called for ethnic cleansing and Nazism, and insulted religion and God.”

Shchepikhin himself told journalists that the Chechens tortured him for several hours and forced him to apologize on video.

Later Investigative Committee aroused Shchepikhin faces criminal charges: he is accused of public calls to extremism and inciting hatred, which investigators found in videos he published. He has been in pretrial detention since June 6.

Six Chechens accused of kidnapping and abuse of office remain at large.