Four young men were punished with 15-day detention after a meeting in Krymsk, a southern Russian town hit by a devastating flood this month, during which they "behaved aggressively" and claimed that the calamity had produced a higher death toll than official reports said, a senior police spokesman said on Tuesday.
The four men were charged with “petty hooliganism,” Igor Zhelyabin, head of the pres service of the Krasnodar territorial police authority, told Interfax.
The men posed as volunteers during a meeting on Monday between victims of the flood and deputies to the territorial governor, Zhelyabin said. They “behaved aggressively and provoked a conflict with Cossacks who were maintaining order,” he said. “One of them hit a Cossack.”
The four men were also “crying out information, including about an allegedly much larger death toll of the flood,” the spokesman said.
A source in the Krasnodar territorial administration told Interfax on Tuesday that the four men’s allegation about the death toll was false. “During an interview at the police station, they said they had obtained the information that the flood produced more fatalities from the Internet,” the source said.
Several thousand buildings in Krymsk, the Black Sea resort of Gelendzhik and the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk found themselves under water on July 6-7 as a result of torrential rain. According to official reports, about 170 people were killed. Those killed included five who died of an electric shock in Gelendzhik.
Krymsk was the worst-hit place.
