Ex US General Consul in Vladivostok to face trial

Ex US General Consul in Vladivostok Douglas Kent will definitely face trial on charges of inflicting heavy injuries on a young Russian Alexander Kashin, said American lawyer of the complainant John Gallagher at a press conference in Vladivostok on Thursday.

The action proceedings are drawing to a close. The case has been taken for consideration by the court of the US state of Virginia.

On October 27th, 1998, a car accident in the centre of Vladivostok, which occurred due to Kent's fault, left the 23-year-old resident of the Primorye town of Bolshoi Kamen an invalid. To return back to normal, the young man needs a costly operation, for which the workers' family does not have money.

Gallagher and his colleague Larisa Demberg had to make a lot of effort to "start legal proceedings", he said at the press conference. Besides, Kent was hiding, so they had to resort to the services of a detective agency.

To give Kent no opportunity to elude the process, Kashin's lawyers obtained the court's permission to publish the summon in newspapers. "The US judicial practice has already seen similar precedents, and the high rank of the defendants did not protect them," the lawyer stressed.

When speaking on a possible sum of compensation for the damage and the process expenditures, he explained that the lower limit had been set at $150,000, while the upper was left to the jury.