Drunk top Russian cop kills pedestrian

Moscow – A Russian police chief was arrested early on Saturday after driving into a pedestrian in Saint Petersburg with excess alcohol in his blood, a police statement said.Sergei Kudriavtsev, 28, head of the criminal police in Vsevolojsk, killed the man at a crossroads as he was driving his Honda Accord at around 03:30.

A police patrol which was near the scene and suspicions aroused by a “car of a foreign make”, managed to stop Kudriavtsev from driving away, the statement said.The police chief was found to have a “moderate” blood alcohol level of 1.2g, it said.

The media regularly report fatal accidents involving police or other security personnel, often while they are drunk.Russia recorded a record 200 000 road accidents last year, killing nearly 28 000 people, many of them blamed on bad or drunken driving.

Last month a drunk driver rammed a bus stop in Moscow at high speed and killed seven people including five orphans from a children’s home. And on Saturday the funeral was held in the capital of popular stage actress Marina Golub, 54, who was killed in a collision on Tuesday between her taxi and a Cadillac which ran a red light at 120km an hour.