Yegor Yurchenko being led into court. Photo: Pavel Sidorov / URA.ru

A court in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, has sentenced a physically disabled Roma teenager to nine years and 10 months in prison for the murder of a taxi driver that sparked anti-Roma protests in the town last October, regional news website 74.ru reported on Tuesday.

Yegor Yurchenko, a 17-year-old man from the town of Korkino in the Chelyabinsk region, was found guilty of the murder of Yelena Manzhosova and of car theft.

Yurchenko, who has been unable to speak or hear since birth, was also ordered to pay 164,000 rubles (€1,800) to the family of the murdered woman and another 2 million rubles (€22,300) to her mother, according to regional website Ura News.

According to the prosecution, Yurchenko had taken Manzhosova’s taxi on 23 October. During the ride, a conflict arose, in the course of which Yurchenko stabbed Manzhosova and stole her car, the investigation said.

Yurchenko had his sentence conveyed to him via a sign language interpreter. He pleaded not guilty, according to Ura News.

Yurchenko’s father said after the verdict was announced that his son was “completely lost and disoriented”, adding that he had “the mental age of … someone aged 11-13”, which the prosecutors and the investigators “chose to ignore”.

When news that members of the Roma community may have been implicated in Manzhosova’s murder emerged in Korkino on 24 October, race riots began, with angry locals heading to a village where a high number of Roma lived and setting several houses on fire.

Police in Korkino also conducted “preventive” raids against members of the Roma community, which Nadezhda Demeter, a representative of the Russian Roma community, called “punitive”.