Penza, 22 January 2016. PenzaNews. The court sentence to the Penza citizen who had held hostage his wife and two children, 2 and 5, in the spring of 2015, has entered into force. The man will now spend 12 years in prison.

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The man declined to admit guilt in the crime and continued to press his version of the events, Natalya Bychenkova, press secretary of the Penza region court, told PenzaNews agency.

“According to him, when he came home, police officers knocked at the door to arrest him for previous crimes. He asked them to wait for 20 minutes to speak with the family, drank a bottle of vodka, and became very drunk. When the man did not come out after the requested time, the police began to threaten him with physical harm: he was frightened, and so refused to leave the flat. To stave the police from storming the flat, he told them he rigged a grenade with a trip wire, even though he did not restrain anybody in the flat as the wife did not want to leave him and the children wanted to stay with their mother. Some time later, his mother called him and asked to let out the younger daughter, and he agreed. He also wanted to let the other daughter out, but she did not want to separate from the mother,” Natalya Bychenkova told PenzaNews agency.

However, his version is different from the one presented by his wife, she added.

“According to the woman, her husband accused her of ‘ratting him out’ to the police, and demanded her and the children to stand with him at the front door. The children were crying. The woman pleaded her husband several times to let her and the children go, but he did not react, threatened to push her out of the window, and walked around the flat with a knife in his hand. They were freed by the police who entered the house through the window,” she explained.

In addition, the man was found guilty of two armed robberies, a theft, and misappropriation of funds.

“The convict disagreed with the sentence and appealed the verdict, but the appeal was dismissed,” she clarified.