Two sentenced in killing of liberal Russian lawmaker

A court on Thursday convicted two men in the 1998 contract killing of liberal parliament member Galina Starovoitova, news agencies reported.

Starovoitova was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building in St. Petersburg.

The actual doer of the assassination, Vitaly Akishin, was sentenced to 23 years (the prosecution insisted on life imprisonment) in a high-security prison and the organizer of the attack, Yuri Kolchin, received a 20-year sentence, the reports said. Four others charged in the case were either acquitted or freed because of the expiration of the time limitation on the crime they had been convicted in (concealment of inculpatory evidence).

It still remains unclear who ordered the assassination.