Russian Investigator Jailed for Freeing Lover From Jail
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}An investigator in Russia's northern city of Saint Petersburg was sentenced to prison on Friday for freeing a jailed convict with whom she had fallen in love, prosecutors said.
The city's Kuibyshevsky district court sentenced Yana Antonova to a year and eight months in prison for abusing her position after she "for personal reasons freed a man accused of a serious crime," prosecutors said in a statement.
Antonova, a 35-year-old police investigator, fell in love with the convict, Mikhail Beryukov, as she investigated a case in which he was involved, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported, citing a police source.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Beryukov was being investigated for fraud and also had a previous murder conviction, the ITAR-TASS state news agency reported.
In February 2009, Antonova faked a document ordering him to be transferred from a pre-trial detention center in Saint Petersburg to one in the nearby Novgorod region, prosecutors said.
She then dismissed a police convoy assigned to transfer Beryukov and took him to an apartment where they spent the night, prosecutors said. He was detained by police a few days later at the apartment.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Antonova confessed to police that she was harboring Beryukov after he spent his days of freedom taking drugs and refused to return to the detention center, ITAR-TASS reported.